Membrane reactor for the production of hydrogen and higher hydrocarbons from methane over Ru/Al2O3 catalyst

It is known that higher alkanes can be produced from methane over Ru, Pt or Co supported on silica by using a two-step reaction sequence. In this investigation, a dense Pd/Ag flat membrane reactor (FMR) and a traditional reactor (TR) are analysed referring to experimental data. The two-step reaction over Ru-based catalyst was chosen as a model reaction to be investigated. The experiments carried out in this study confirm that, using a membrane reactor, it is possible to obtain consumed methane values greater than the ones obtained in a TR for the first step operating at the same experimental conditions. A direct consequence should be an increase of the yield in higher hydrocarbons. In addition, this work shows that the membrane reactor performances can be improved by properly tuning the operating conditions. Experimental results of this work are compared with both experimental data obtained in a previous work using a dense Pd/Ag tubular membrane reactor (TMR) and experimental data reported in the literature.