Reactor design for thin film catalyst activity characterization

Abstract

Thin film-based systems hold enormous potential for atomic-scale control of catalysts and their supports. So far, there is only limited reactor design with dedicated characterization methods for such catalyst systems. Thus, this work focuses on designing and prototyping a tailored reactor to characterize thin films catalysts. Herein, an electrically driven reactor and its virtual replica are designed together in a way to measure and describe the reaction processes over thin film catalysts. The developed numerical model comprised of coupled fluid-, thermal-, and chemical reaction models in combination with the well-defined geometry of the prototype allows a fast and comprehensive testing of novel catalysts systems, which is illustrated by acetylene hydrogenation with a palladium based thin film catalyst on silicon substrates as first model reaction. A power law model was found to be most appropriate to describe the kinetics of the corresponding reaction. It is shown that the codesigned virtual replica offers a strong platform for comprehensive testing and fairly accurate description of thin film catalysis.