Subtask 4.4 - North Dakota Lignite Fuel Upgrading

Technical Report · Sun Mar 15 04:00:00 EDT 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/984652· OSTI ID:984652

Swanson, Michael ^[1]

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1. University Of North Dakota

This project will add the capability for the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) to conduct Fischer-Tropsch (FT) catalyst testing at a scale consistent with the benchscale continuous fluid-bed reactor. This capability will enable various vendors to test their FT catalysts on actual coal-derived syngas. The project goals were to also develop some EERC expertise with issues associated with FT liquid production. A study by Dr. Calvin Bartholmew at Brigham Young University (BYU) is further apparent that it is possible to build a single reactor (rather than multiple reactors of different sizes) consisting of three 1-inch-diameter, 10 foot-long tubes to accommodate the anticipated range of catalytic activities and process conditions. However, this single reactor should ideally be designed to operate over a significant range of recycle ratio (e.g., 1-10), temperature (25-400 C), pressure (10-25 bar), flow rate (1-6 scfm), and cooling duty (0.2-1.5 kW). It should have the flexibility of flowing gas to one, two, or three tubes. Based on the recommended design specifications provided by BYU while staying within the approved budget, the EERC decided to build a two fixed-bed reactor system with the capability to add a third reactor at a later time. This system was constructed to be modular and sized such that it can fit into the area around the EERC continuous fluid-bed reactor or also be located in explosion-rated areas such as the gasification tower next to the EERC pilot-scale transport reactor or in the National Center for Hydrogen Technology building high-bay area.

• Research Organization: University Of North Dakota
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: FC26-98FT40320
• OSTI ID: 984652
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT
08 HYDROGEN
CATALYSTS
DESIGN
FLEXIBILITY
FLOW RATE
GASIFICATION
HYDROGEN
LIGNITE
NORTH DAKOTA
PRODUCTION
SPECIFICATIONS
TESTING
TRANSPORT