Energy absorption and reaction mechanism for thermal pyrolysis of n-decane under supercritical pressure

In this work, the behavior of mild thermal cracking n-decane was investigated experimentally and numerically. A developed experimental method of electrical heating tube was used to analyze the thermal cracking of n-decane under various temperatures and pressures. The results showed that, at low cracking conversion of 12%, the selectivities of all cracked products are approximately equal to constant values. A one-step global reaction model consisting of 11 species was established for mild-cracking n-decane and a novel on-line density measurement method was developed to improve the precision of residence time calculation, thus the kinetics parameters. The reliability of the reaction model was confirmed through comparing the experimental results with simulated values by using Chemkin program with the deviation less than 10%. The chemical heat sink of thermal cracking n-decane was evaluated and the result showed that the heat absorption provided by chemical endothermic reactions is unnegligible even at low conversion.