Development of validation experiments for bubbling liquid metal thermal reactors

Liquid metals are usually pure chemical elements characterized by a very low degradation at very high temperature, low vapor pressure, high conductivity and diffusivity. However, the utilization of liquid metals for the design of chemical reactors has been scarcely tackled by the research community. Nevertheless, the application of liquid metal as media to hold high temperature processes is very promising. Processes as methane pyrolysis, dry reforming or metal oxide carbon-reduction are under development in our group. The numerical simulation of multiphase/multicomponent physical phenomena is a very challenging issue. For instance, a detailed 3-D CFD simulation of hydrocarbon pyrolysis requires the coupling of multiphase thermal-hydraulic physics (gas components, liquid metal and carbon particles) with chemical kinetics is not clearly validated with current available tools. We are developing experimental facilities and programs for analysis and validation of gas injection into liquid metal, either at micro-scale, as macro-scale. We have designed and built a 1.5 m liquid metal column for the validation of methane bubbling into a liquid metal bath, as well as small scale devices to evaluate the phenomena at the level of microbubble formation and chemical kinetics independently from other physical effects.