Optimum Residence Time in Order to Achieve Maximum Possible Yield of Formaldehyde from Free Catalyst Partial Oxidation of Methane

فاقد چكيده فارسي

Formaldehyde is in great demand either as feed or as intermediate for petrochemical industries. The current technology for the conversion of methane to formaldehyde involves costly and busy steps; reforming of methane to syngas, conversion of syngas to methanol and the oxidation of methanol to formaldehyde. This process suffers from high-maintenance catalysts demand, costly and energy-intensive intermediate step of syngas production and requires massive economies scale in order to be profitable. While there exist large natural gas sources in the remote and abandoned areas which their capacity is too low to apply syngas technologies. With this regards, the catalyst free direct conversion of methane to formaldehyde process is a promising option for using the natural gas resources, specifically small-scale ones. This study investigated comprehensive simulation study of catalyst free direct conversion of methane to formaldehyde using special type of annular flow micro reactor and determined optimum residence time in order to achieve maximum possible yield of formaldehyde per one-pass of micro reactor. Achieving a 4.7% formaldehyde yield is one of the promising findings of this study because it’s approximately twice as high as the corresponding best experimental result reported (2.4% yield of formaldehyde).