Study on Nickel mesh catalyst in methane oxidation
The oxidation of natural gas in the presence of catalyst is an essential and common industrial process followed to produce the water gas. In addition of this, the process ensures the confirmed route of intensive studies made on the large and important hydrocarbon production processes. The catalysts used in this process are mostly the transition metals like nickel, copper and iron. Moreover noble elements are also used as catalyst such as Ru, Rh, Pd, Pt and Ir. Among of all these catalyst the nickel based products like nickel mesh describe high performance, high selectivity and cost effectiveness.
However the use of nickel items in the above process causes the production of carbon that hinders the active sites of the catalyst so as the performance of catalyst. This decreases the life of catalyst ultimately. It has been found that the surface produced methyl radicals are more significant in the catalytic oxidation of methane. The methyl radicals tends to stay on the catalytic layer to begin the subsequent reactions or left by the catalyst and they participate in the gasphase reactions. For spongy catalyst, the mass shift constraints for the radicals present inside the holes makes it tough to determine the inter impact of reactions on the catalyst. Therefore the non porous catalysts remove the intraparticle mixing resistance to determine the influences of radical adsorption on process of carbon production and hydrocarbon manufacturing.
In other phase of studies, the blend of nickel with other metallic elements like iron utilized as catalyst to enhance the methane transition and extended the life of catalyst. The bimettalic catalysts like iron – nickel obtain improved methane conversion and extended life for the production of methane dehydrogenation process. Thus, it requires determining the effects of modification o nickel catalyst by iron for the catalytic oxidation of methane.
In this research the iron plated non porous nickel mesh catalyst by dip coating process for the catalytic oxidation of methane. Particularly the purpose of this study is to determine the performance of the nickel mesh combined with ferrous catalyst in the oxidation of methane and the product development rates to determine the mechanism of product formation. The experiments were made in the fixed bed quartz vessel reactor at the elevated temperature and ambient pressure conditions.
The testing materials nickel mesh catalyst was obtained from the rare wire weaving. The properties of Nickel mesh used as catalyst are provided below:
Wire diameter in (mm), count of wires per inch Open area (%) Elemental
condition Nickel mesh 0.25 40 x 40 36 Ni: 100%.
The chemical purity level more than 99.99% methane, extremely pure oxygen and ultra high purity argon, all the materials were sourced from BOC, Australia were used without subsequent processing.