Design of innovative microwave reactor for high temperature catalytic reactions

The urgent need for ecologic transition touched many aspects of our life, as well as of Chemical Industries, especially when endothermic reactions are involved, since they require large amount of heat. This was translated in the attempt to avoid burning fossil fuels, which finally leads to reduce greenhouse gasses emissions and to reevaluate economic aspects of innovative energy sources. A promising alternative is the usage of electrical heating techniques as microwave heating or others. In this work, a microwave heated tubular reactor was designed using COMSOL Multiphysics simulations and some tests for the determination of the main properties of the catalytic bed. It turned out that using a cylindrical waveguide, along which microwaves propagate, as the reactor body itself, a correctly placed catalytic bed, whose support is made mainly of SiC, can be heated at very high temperatures with high energetic efficiency thanks to microwaves heating effects, creating the perfect environment for endothermic reactions.