Aspen Plus Essay

For the reactive flash volatilization (RFV) process based on the knowledge that the catalyst bed is preheated to high temperature, pyrolysis of the heated cellulose particles on the surface of the bed is expected to be fast enough that it will not be a rate-limiting step. Hence, the kinetics of the RFV of cellulose reduces to gasification of the produced volatile organic compounds (VOCs) on and in the catalyst bed.
To represent the RFV of the VOCs from flash pyrolysis of cellulose, Aspen Plus has been used as the primary modelling tool. The main advantage of using Aspen Plus is that it dramatically reduces the time required for compilation and critical evaluation of properties of reaction components which underlie difficulties in process model development.
As a whole, kinetics and reaction mechanisms for autothermal reforming of bio-oil or its constituents are scarce. Hence, to get started with the modelling work, methane, which is the simplest hydrocarbon, was chosen as the reactant since there exists a relatively significant amount of studies on autothermal reforming of methane in the …show more content…
The logic behind this is that in the presence of a catalyst and at the high operating temperatures, the catalytic partial oxidation and thermal decomposition of glycerol are expected to achieve equilibrium much faster than the reactions involving steam. Thus, the steam reforming of methane and water-gas shift reactions were rather considered to be kinetically limited where a plug flow model operating adiabatically was used to represent the process. The kinetic information previously used to model the autothermal reforming of methane was used this time for modelling the second stage of glycerol