Induction Heating: An Enabling Technology for the Heat Management in Catalytic Processes

This perspective illustrates the electromagnetic induction heating technology for a rational heat control in catalytic heterogeneous processes. It mainly focuses on the remarkable advantages of this approach in terms of process intensification, energy efficiency, reactor setup simplification, and safety issues coming from the use of radio frequency heated susceptors/catalysts in fixed-bed reactors under flow operational conditions. It is a real enabling technology that allows a catalytic process to go beyond reactor bounds, reducing inefficient energy transfer issues and heat dissipation phenomena while improving reactor hydrodynamics. Hence, it allows pushing catalytic processes to the limits of their kinetics. Undoubtedly, inductive heating represents a twist in performing catalysis. Indeed, it offers unique solutions to overcome heat transfer limitations (i.e. slow heating/cooling rates, nonuniform heating environments, low energy efficiency) to those endo- and exothermic catalytic transformations that make use of conventional heating methodologies.