Low temperature catalytic steam reforming of propane–methane mixture into methane-rich gas: Experiment and macrokinetic modeling

Steam reforming of propane–methane mixture into methane-rich gas was studied in a fixed-bed continuous-flow reactor in a temperature interval of 150–325 °C under atmospheric pressure over Ni-based catalyst. It was found that the catalyst had good performance under low steam-to-carbon ratio of 0.39–0.58 and provided equilibrium product distribution at GHSV = 670–3100 h−1. Macrokinetic modeling of the experimental data obtained was performed in the framework of isothermal plug-flow reactor model. For the first time the two-step macro-kinetic scheme was suggested, that includes the reactions of irreversible propane steam reforming (first-order on propane): C3H8 + 6H2O → 3CO2 + 10H2 with activation energy 112 kJ/mole and reversible CO2 methanation (first-order on hydrogen): CO2 + 4H2 ⇄ CH4 + 2H2O with activation energy 50 kJ/mole. It was shown that the proposed scheme describes quantitatively all the experimental results.