Abstract
Recent discoveries of new natural gas sources and advances in natural gas production made the conversion of methane a promising technique to obtain different types of fuels and fine chemicals, such as aromatics. The non-oxidative conversion of methane occurs without the presence of O2, thus not emitting COx. In addition, this renewable-based technology can also lead to a reduction in organic waste generation, once biomethane may be synthesized from organic residue. One of the challenges to implanting this technology is that this reaction is thermodynamically unfavorable and it only happens in harsh conditions with temperatures above 800 K in the presence of a catalyst, nevertheless, low conversions of methane are achieved, ranging from 10 % to 15 %. High coke formation and quick catalyst deactivation are other issues this system must overcome. Many efforts were made experimentally focusing on the reaction conditions and the reactor project to reach better methane conversion. In this case, to optimize and find better conditions computational simulation software, such as AspenPlus® may help. Therefore, in this work, AspenPlus® was used to simulate the direct non-oxidative conversion of methane in a plug flow reactor with a 3 % Mo/HMCM-22 catalyst. For the simulated results, the reaction produced benzene, ethylene, hydrogen, and naphthalene with the best methane conversion of 11.7 %. In the optimization step, a methane conversion of 13.0 % was found. These results indicated that the modeling requires a more complex kinetic model to fit the experimental data.
