Kinetic modeling of hydrogen production by the catalytic reforming of crude ethanol over a co-precipitated Ni-Al2O3Ni-Al2O3 catalyst in a packed bed tubular reactor

In this work, we performed a kinetic modeling of the production of hydrogen by the catalytic reforming of crude ethanol over a 15%-Ni/Al2O3Ni/Al2O3 catalyst prepared by the co-precipitation technique. The kinetics experiments were carried out at atmospheric pressure in a packed bed tubular reactor (8 mm inside diameter, 150 mm heated length, 53.0 mm bed height), at temperature in the range of 593–793 K. Eley Rideal assumptions where the surface reaction involved an adsorbed species and a free gaseous species were used to develop the reaction mechanism and four models were proposed based on this mechanism, from which a new kinetic model based on the dissociation of adsorbed crude ethanol as the rate-determining step was developed for this novel catalytic process. This model was of the form: -rA=(2.08×103e-4430/RTNA)/[1+3.83×107NA]2-rA=(2.08×103e-4430/RTNA)/[1+3.83×107NA]2. The absolute average deviation between experimental rates and those predicted using this model was 6%.