A proposal of a spray pulse operation for liquid film dehydrogenation - 2-propanol dehydrogenation on a plate catalyst

This paper proposes a non-steady operation of a thin liquid film reactor for dehydrogenation of 2-propanol. The reactant 2-propanol is supplied as a spray pulse of a certain amount (1 to 1.5mmol) and at a certain interval(0.5 to 6s) on a Pt/Al2O3/Al catalyst kept at 368 K. The dehydrogenation reaction proceeds on the catalyst under thin reactant liquid film, and the produced hydrogen and acetone are released to the gas phase through the film immediately. Therefore, the products on the catalyst are kept at low concentrations. During one spray pulse of the reaction proceeds, the liquid film evaporates completely, which enables the regeneration of catalyst by releasing the adsorbed acetone, and the next spray pulse is supplied to the regenerated catalyst surface. This series of process achieved the reaction rate of 10 times as high as for the ordinary gas-phase steady operation. In this study, we used a plate catalyst support produced by anodic oxidation of aluminum, that has high heat conductivity. This is the key point to enable the non-steady operation by instant heat supply for the reaction and evaporation through the heat conductive catalyst kept at 368 K. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.