Autothermal reactor concept for combined oxidative coupling and methane reforming

A new autothermal reactor concept is developed for the simultaneous production of ethylene by oxidative coupling (OCM) and synthesis gas by steam reforming of methane (SRM), supported by a detailed numerical modeling study. The proposed reactor consists of two separate reaction chambers which are thermally coupled. OCM is carried out on packed bed reverse flow membrane reactor tubes submerged in a fluidized bed where the unconverted methane and by-products are reformed together with some additional steam producing synthesis gas and consuming the reaction enthalpy emerged from the exothermic OCM. The exothermic OCM and endothermic SRM could be very efficiently coupled into an overall autothermal reactor. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 8th World Congress of Chemical Engineering (Montreal, Quebec, Canada 8/23-27/2009)