陈初升教授（右1）与吴奇院士（左1，773校友）交流工作经验

最新的权威科学网站nature的scienceupdate报道了我校材料科学与工程系陈初升老师在陶瓷透氧膜方面的研究成果。该成果发表在国际顶极化学学术期刊“Angewandte Chemie International Edition”上。这一重大突破在节约天然气到合成气转化生产成本中具有十分重要的意义。引起国外的广泛关注。

原文如下：

http://www.nature.com/nsu/031103/031103-4.html

Chemists engineer solution to gas problem

Process may cut bills for turning natural gas to raw ingredient for

industrial chemistry.

5 November 2003

PHILIP BALL

A new process could cut the cost of a key raw ingredient for the chemicals

industry. It transforms natural gas into syngas, a mix of carbon monoxide

and hydrogen.

Syngas is readily converted to methanol and other liquid fuels. Hydrogen

in it is also used as a fuel. Petrochemical plants currently produce vast

quantities of syngas, mostly by an expensive method called steam reforming

-reacting methane with steam at high temperatures - which consumes a lot

of energy.

Chu-sheng Chen, of the University of Science and Technology of China in

Hefei

, and colleagues have improved on the main alternative method, called

partial

oxidation of methane (POM)1. This is the incomplete burning of methane in

pure oxygen to yield carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Complete methane burning

, in contrast, produces carbon dioxide and water.

Pure oxygen is expensive, so researchers have long wanted to carry out POM

using air instead. But this converts some of the nitrogen in air into

nitrogen

oxides, which are noxious pollutants.

One way around the problem is to use a membrane that lets oxygen through

to react with methane on the other side, but does not allow nitrogen to pass

. Unfortunately, it is hard to find membrane materials that remain stable

, without decomposing or reacting, when exposed to air at the relatively

high temperatures needed to produce syngas.

This is the problem that Chen and his colleagues help to alleviate in their

two-step process. Methane flows down a pipe whose wall consists at one

point

of an oxygen-permeable membrane. This membrane is a ceramic - a mixture

of various metals and oxygen.

Oxygen drawn from air outside the membrane passes into the pipe, where it

burns the methane into carbon dioxide and water. This mixture, along with

unburned methane, then passes further down the pipe to a plug of hot

catalyst

, which converts the gas mixture into syngas.

In other words, oxygen is filtered from air in a different part of the pipe

to where the syngas is made. So the oxygen-permeable membrane is not

exposed

to such fearsome conditions as in the conventional POM process, where

everything

happens in the same place.

The researchers suggest that there is also less danger in this set-up,

compared

with a single-stage POM process, of the catalyst getting clogged with coke

, a by-product of syngas formation.

However, small projects such as this face many technical hurdles before they

can be deployed on an industrial scale.

References

Chen, C.-S. et al. Conversion of methane to syngas by a membrane-based

oxidation

-reforming process. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 42, 5196 - 5198

, doi:10.1002/anie.200351085 (2003).