Process Intensification at Different Length-Scales

Process intensification (PI) concepts offer opportunities to enhance the energy efficiencies, and reduce the emissions and costs for the manufacture of chemicals, medicines and fuels. This talk will describe our use of PI concepts at different length-scales to design and demonstrate two process systems: a highly efficient, thermally integrated system for the production of hydrogen, and a nanoscale cascade catalytic system for the hydrogenation of CO₂ to value-added products. The hydrogen production system is designed to use latent from the vaporization of H₂O to control the axial temperature gradient of a reactor that couples autothermal reforming, water gas shift and preferential oxidation. Cascade systems use multiple catalytic species to facilitate multi-step reactions in a single vessel. A low temperature, heterogeneous cascade system is demonstrated for the selective hydrogenation of CO₂ to methanol and dimethyl ether via formic acid and methyl formate intermediates. Technoeconomic analyses indicate that these two modular systems could reduce the cost of distributed hydrogen production and CO₂ hydrogenation.