(67h) Advanced Manufacturing for Electrosynthesis of Fuels and Chemicals from CO2
AIChE Annual Meeting
2021
2021 Annual Meeting
Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division
Electrochemical CO2 Conversion II
Monday, November 8, 2021 - 2:18pm to 2:36pm
In this work, we demonstrate advanced manufacturing (AM) for rapid development and testing for improved performance across an evolution of reactor designs in bulk pH neutral conditions (pH < 8). Using AM VFRs and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models, we explore activation- and mixed-control regimes across a range of operating conditions, including flow rate and electrochemical potential. Furthermore, we define a dimensionless number (Da) to identify mass transport regimes in the reactor based on several underlying mass transport mechanisms. These AM VFRs provide effective delivery of CO2 and result in remarkable selectivity to multi-carbon products (>85% FE towards C2+), improved single pass CO2 conversion (16.6%), and high ethylene (3.67%) and ethanol (3.66%) yields compared to the literature. We propose AM as a promising approach for accelerating reactor design and understanding governing phenomena while de-risking scale-up and optimization for industrial implementation.
This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.