Monoliths with Reactive Flow: Modeling and Experimentation

Monoliths have been extensively used in industrial processes for chemical conversions, heat management, and waste controls. Monoliths have often found their attractive applications when process detractors, such as flow maldistribution, hot spots, excessive pressure drops, low overall effectiveness factors, catalyst attrition, cannot be overcome by using conventional reactors. For example, the low pressure-drop advantage of the monolith beds has been well recognized by high throughput reactor application for catalytic partial oxidations of hydrocarbons; Monolith reactors have been also explored as an alternative to the standard hydrotreating reactors to utilize their unique gas-liquid-solid contacting features. Monoliths have been even commercialized on an enormous scale for flue-gas NOx clean up and been reliably used for automotive emission controls such as catalytic converters and recently as diesel particulate filters. There is a growing need to extend our conventional catalyst and reaction engineering knowledgebase to this new reactor category, to have better understanding of flow contacting, multispecies transports and detailed reaction kinetics and their interactions in monolith reactors, to have improved understanding of monolith structure impact and materials (washcoat) influence on monolith performance. All these will benefit to both current and future monolith applications. This session will provide an exciting place to share the experience and the state of art of monolith researches with reactive flow focused in both modeling and experimental work. The submissions of research papers in following areas are encouraged; the papers of monolith modeling or/and experiment in the areas other than following listed are also welcome. -Short contact time, high throughput catalytic monolith reactors; -Catalytic monolith reactors with multiphase flow; -Monoliths for stationary-sources and automotive emission controls; -Novel heat managements using catalytic monoliths; -Recent model development of catalyzed monoliths; -Experimental work on catalytic monolith reactors.