Herri Susanto

Process assessment of small scale low temperature methanol synthesis

Biomass is a renewable energy resource and has the potential to make a significant impact on domestic fuel supplies. Biomass can be converted to fuel like methanol via several step process. The process can be split into following main steps: biomass preparation, gasification, gas cooling and cleaning, gas shift and methanol synthesis. Untill now these configuration still has a problem like high production cost, catalyst deactivation, economy of scale and a huge energy requirements. These problems become the leading inhibition for biomass conversion to methanol, which should be resolved to move towards the economical. To address these issues, we developed various process and new configurations for methanol synthesis via methyl formate. This configuration combining two reactors: the one reactor for the carbonylation of methanol and CO to form methyl formate, and the second for the hydrogenolysis of methyl formate and H2 to form two molecule of methanol. Four plant process configurations were compared with t...

The effect of acid leaching time in modifying natural zeolite as catalyst for toluene steam reforming

In the pyrolysis process, it is needed to know the value of k (rate costant) to know the rate of reaction that occurs. It is needed to calculate k caused by T effect due to the reason that it is extremely difficult experimentally to find rate constants. The pyrolysis process was carried out for three hours with the minimum condition of Oxygen using mahogany wood. It was used the pyrolysis temperature variations of 250°C to 800°C. The results showed the increasing temperature and decreasing mass of char as long as the process to obtain, the kinetic rate of char k . We used two calculation approaches method to find the calc ulated k . Fristly, it used the total kinetic rate model equation with the equation k T = 60.3 e -2028.4/T and the second one, it was used the local kinetic rate model. In the local kinetic rate approached, it was divided the 3 temperature ranges; k 1 in the range of 28°C - 250°C was k 1 = 539.1 e -2907.3/T , k 2 in the range of 250°C to 500°C was k 2 = 27.11 e -1424/T ; and k 3 in the range of at range 500°C to 800°C was k 3 = 572.4 e -4549.2/T . Then, by using the found k values, it was found the great achievement results that the decreasing mass of char in the calculation was coincide with the experimental results. It was used both kinetic rate methods depending on the required energy was needed in the pyrolysis process; at low pyrolysis temperatures, the appropriate kinetic rate model was a local kinetic rate model, and for pyrolysis at high temperatures of 600°C to 800°C, the accurate kinetic rate model was the total kinetic rate model.