No abstract

This review summarizes the recent progress in methanation catalysts for SNG production, which will provide insights for future catalysts design.

CO methanation reaction over the Ni/Al2O3 catalysts for synthetic natural gas production was systematically investigated by tuning a number of parameters, including using different commercial Al2O3 supports and varying NiO and MgO loading, calcination temperature, space velocity, H2/CO ratio, reaction pressure, and time, respectively. The catalytic performance was greatly influenced by the above-mentioned parameters. Briefly, a large surface area of the Al2O3 support, a moderate interaction between Ni and the support Al2O3, a proper Ni content (20 wt %), and a relatively low calcination temperature (400 °C) promoted the formation of small NiO particles and reducible β-type NiO species, which led to high catalytic activities and strong resistance to the carbon deposition, while addition of a small amount of MgO (2 wt %) could improve the catalyst stability by reducing the carbon deposition; other optimized conditions that enhanced the catalytic performance included high reaction pressure (3.0 MPa), high H2/CO ratio (≥3:1), low space velocity, and addition of quartz sand as the diluting agent in catalyst bed. The best catalyst combination was 20–40 wt % of NiO supported on a commercial Al2O3 (S4) with addition of 2–4 wt % of MgO, calcined at 400–500 °C and run at a reaction pressure of 3.0 MPa. On this catalyst, 100% of CO conversion could be achieved within a wide range of reaction temperature (300–550 °C), and the CH4 selectivity increased with increasing temperature and reached 96.5% at a relatively low temperature of 350 °C. These results will be very helpful to develop highly efficient Ni-based catalysts for the methanation reaction, to optimize the reaction process, and to better understand the above reaction.

We extend the generalized energy-based fragmentation (GEBF) approach to molecular crystals under periodic boundary conditions (PBC), and we demonstrate the performance of the method for a variety of molecular crystals. With this approach, the lattice energy of a molecular crystal can be obtained from the energies of a series of embedded subsystems, which can be computed with existing advanced molecular quantum chemistry methods. The use of the field compensation method allows the method to take long-range electrostatic interaction of the infinite crystal environment into account and make the method almost translationally invariant. The computational cost of the present method scales linearly with the number of molecules in the unit cell. Illustrative applications demonstrate that the PBC-GEBF method with explicitly correlated quantum chemistry methods is capable of providing accurate descriptions on the lattice energies and structures for various types of molecular crystals. In addition, this approach can be employed to quantify the contributions of various intermolecular interactions to the theoretical lattice energy. Such qualitative understanding is very useful for rational design of molecular crystals.