Magnetically driven spatial organisation of a multicomponent fluidized bed for intensified CO2 conversion.

Increasing CO2 emissions are a major concern to the world today. Catalytic technologies for converting CO2 into useful products can play a pivotal role in addressing this challenge. The present project focuses on the intensification of chemical looping super-dry reforming, a promising technology for enhanced CO2 conversion. The efficiency of this process can be boosted by moving from fixed to fluidized bed operation, to enhance gas-solid interaction, and by optimizing the arrangement within the reactor bed of materials that provide multiple functionalities such as catalyst, oxygen storage or CO2 sorbent. Both these improvements, materials fluidization and organization, can be realized by applying appropriate external magnetic fields to a reactor bed, in combination with the use of solids, based on Fe, Ni and/or Co, with different magnetic properties. The magnetic forces will not only add extra fluidization and stabilization to the bed, but at the same time they can arrange the particles into separate reactor zones based on their magnetic properties, thereby creating fluidized, yet organised layers. Supported by computational magnetization and fluid dynamics, a magnetic field assisted fluidized reactor will be built to study solids organization based on magnetic properties.