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in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).This article is the first experimental demonstration of autothermal operation in an open loop reactor for catalytic abatement of low-concentration volatile organic compounds (VOC). The system under investigation, which comprises three reactors organized in a loop with automatic switching of the feed position, has been successfully operated for ethylene oxidation. The influence of the feed flow rate and concentration on the pulse velocity and maximal temperature has been investigated. A simple analytical approximation for front velocity in the nonadiabatic one-dimensional (1D) model has been derived and compared with the experimental results.

While previous studies experimentally demonstrated that loop reactor (LR) can be sustained with a lean feed (using ethylene combustion) and have analyzed the single‐reaction adiabatic case, this work analyzes the effects of heat loss and of reactor size to determine the leanest stream (expressed in terms of adiabatic temperature rise ΔTlim) that will sustain the operation. For an adiabatic infinitely long reactor ΔTlim→0 while for a finite reactor ΔTlim scales as (1 + Pe/4)−1 where Pe = Luρcpf/k, and heat loss increases this limit by (β/Pe)1/2. Thus, a good design of a LR will aim to decrease conductivity (k) and radial heat‐transfer coefficient (β) while increasing throughput (u) and reactor length. This article is also the first experimental demonstration of auto‐thermal operation in a LR for catalytic abatement of low‐concentration of methane, showing the leanest stream to be of 8000 ppm vs. 33,000 ppm in a once‐through reactor. Experimental combustion results of methane and of ethylene are compared with model predictions. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 63: 2030–2042, 2017

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