A kinetic study of ethanol steam reforming to produce hydrogen within the region of kinetic rate control was carried out. A Ni(II)-Al(III) lamellar double hydroxide as catalyst precursor was used. H 2 , CO, CO 2 and CH 4 were obtained as products. Using the Langmuir-Hinshelwood (L-H) approach, two kinetic models were proposed. The first was a general model including four reactions, two of them corresponding to ethanol steam reforming and the other two to methane steam reforming. When high temperatures and/or high water/ethanol feed ratios were used, the system could be reduced to two irreversible ethanol steam reforming reactions.

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in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).Many exothermic reactions, such as the oxidation of CO in a catalyst pellet may present multiplicity of steady states. Experimental results suggest this behavior in a copper ceria catalyst, and this in turn would indicate that the kinetics should be nonmonotonic with respect to reactants' compositions. The model for the reaction is described by a two-point boundary value problem that is hard to solve with direct methods, even when seeking a single solution. The aim of this work is to implement a homotopic method to find all the steady states of this kind of problems. The search for solutions is driven by a pseudo arclength continuation. Homotopic curves that passes through all possible solutions are obtained. Also, a study of the dependence of the initial point upon the curve is performed.