A Computational Fluid Dynamics Study on the Effect of Carbon Particle Seeding for the Improvement of Solar Reactor Performance

摘要

This study focuses on a technique, referred to as "solar cracking" of natural gas for the coproduction of hydrogen and carbon as byproduct with zero emission footprint. Seeding a solar reactor with micron-sized carbon particles increases the conversion efficiency drastically due to the radiation absorbed by the carbon particles and additional nucle-ation sites formed by carbon particles for heterogeneous decomposition reaction. The present study numerically tries to investigate the above fact by tracking carbon particles in a Lagrangian framework. The results on the effect of particle loading, particle emis-sivity, injection point location, and effect of using different window screening gases on a flow and temperature distribution inside a confined tornado flow reactor are presented.