Numerical investigation of ventilation air methane catalytic combustion in circular straight and helical coil channels with twisted tape insert in catalytic-monolith reactors

Abstract

In a catalytic combustion of ventilation air methane, one of the key factors determining the reactor performance is the geometry of the reactor. It should be designed to provide maximum energy conversion at minimum catalyst usage and operating cost. This numerical study is conducted to investigate the catalytic combustion of ventilation air methane from a gassy underground mine in a circular straight and helical reactor channel with twisted tape insert. A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model which considers conservation of mass, momentum, energy, and species together with chemical reactions, and constitutive relations for species properties and reactions kinetics was developed and validated against the previously published data. The effect of several key factors affecting the catalytic combustion performance such as inlet Reynolds number, twisted tape ratio, and reactor length are evaluated to obtain the optimum reactor parameters. For evaluation purpose, the reaction performance of the studied reactors will be compared to the straight reactor without twisted tape which is set as a baseline. The results give a firm confirmation on the superior performance of the reactors with twisted tape insert as compared to those without. In addition, it is found that helical reactors generate higher net power as compared to their respective straight reactor counterpart despite having lower FoM due to larger catalyst area. Interestingly, the higher twisting ratio offers better performance in terms of net power as well as FoM. Overall, the results highlight the potential of twisted tape insert application in catalytic combustion.