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 nucleation 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 emissivity, 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.
Issue Section:
Two-Phase Flow and Heat Transfer
Keywords:
carbon,
chemically reactive flow,
computational fluid dynamics,
confined flow,
dissociation,
finite difference methods,
finite volume methods,
heat radiation,
hydrogen,
nucleation,
swirling flow,
temperature distribution,
two-phase flow,
computational flow dynamics,
solar reactor,
carbon seeding,
solar cracking,
hydrogen
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.Copyright © 2010
by American Society of Mechanical Engineers
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