Ghent University

Introduction

Ghent University offers high-quality, research-based education in all academic disciplines. Today Ghent University has 11 faculties and attracts over 30,000 students. With a view to cooperation in research and scientific service, numerous research groups, centres and institutes have been founded over the years. Several of them are renowned worldwide, in various scientific disciplines. The department of Chemical Process engineering and Technical Chemistry (CPTC) is within the faculty of Engineering. Chemical reaction engineering and heterogeneous catalysis in general and, in particular, the kinetics of chemical reactions are major axes of the research in this department. The department comprises five tenured faculty members, about five post-doc researchers, some 20 PhD-students and 8 technicians. In total 20 lab-scale setups and two pilot plant units mainly aimed at kinetic experiments are available.

The competences

The department of Chemical Process engineering and Technical Chemistry (CPTC) at Ghent University (www.ugent.be), focuses its activities on the kinetics of reactions involved in large scale production processes. The research aims at a better understanding and optimization of existing industrial processes and at the development of novel technologies. The catalytic and/or reactor aspects are essential in the majority of the projects. Kinetic studies are not limited to the determination of empirical correlations between the reaction rate and the reaction conditions but based on the fundamental knowledge of the elementary steps. Kinetic parameters are obtained from a limited number of well-designed experiments.

The role in NEXT-GTL

Within the project Ghent University will focus on the microkinetic modelling of methane aromatization (tasks 3.1.B and 3.1.c). This model will include so-called catalyst descriptors that ensure the applicability of the model for a catalyst family rather than a single catalyst and, hence, allow the identification of the best catalyst descriptor values for optimizing the catalyst behaviour in terms of conversion, selectivity and or yield.

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