Design and analysis of a novel reactor for homogeneous oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane to ethylene

Abstract We use a recently developed and experimentally validated 7‐step, 8‐species global kinetic model for homogeneous gas‐phase oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane to design a novel reactor configuration for scale‐up of the process. The reactor consists of a disk of high conductivity inert material, such as SiC, with L / D (length/diameter) ≪ 1, and properly sized perforations having an effective heat Peclet number (), an effective mass Peclet number (), and transverse Peclet number ( P ) <1, approaching the homogeneous lumped thermal limit . It is found that, for feed temperatures in the range of 300–500 K, practical range of space times (0.05–1 s), and ethane to oxygen ratios in the range 2.5–4, it is possible to obtain high ethylene selectivity (>80%) and per‐pass ethylene yields in the range of 50%–60%. The possibility of extending the scale‐up to higher pressures is also discussed.