Fabrication of high aspect ratio ceramic micro-channel in diamond wire sawing as catalyst support used in micro-reactor for hydrogen production

摘要

Ceramic is an ideal material for preparing micro-channel catalyst supports with their characteristics of high temperature resistance, corrosion resistance and mechanical strength. High aspect ratio micro-channel structure has the advantages of large specific surface area, strong mass and heat transfer performance and high material utilization. However, ceramic materials are hard and brittle, and it is difficult to fabricate microchannel structures with aspect ratio more than 1.5:1 by traditional processing methods. In this paper, a cutting method of large diameter diamond wire sawing was proposed. The micro-channels with width of 520 mm and aspect ratio of more than 4:1 was successfully fabricated by this method. Furthermore, the integrity of the micro-channel structure processed by diamond wire sawing was analyzed. And than the effect of surface morphology in different processing parameters on the catalyst loading performance were studied. The catalyst loading strength of ceramic slices with different surface morphology was tested. Finally, the ceramic microchannel array was used as the catalyst support in microreactor for hydrogen production via methanol steam reforming (MSR). The methanol conversion rate and H-2 production rate could reach 87.8 and 74.6 mmol/h, respectively under GHSV 12600 ml/g.h at 300 degrees C. The experimental results show that the large-diameter diamond wire sawing technology can be used to process ceramic microchannels with high aspect ratio; using ceramic microchannel arrays as catalyst supports in hydrogen production can obtain better reaction performance; the feasibility of ceramic materials were broadened as microchannel catalyst supports. (c) 2022 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.