Velocys, part of the Oxford Catalysts Group, is an Ohio company that develops technology for the production of synthetic oil from waste gas, coal, and waste biomass.Â
Velocys owns at least 84 U.S. patents and published patent applications, including a family of patents that issued from an application originally filed in 2003. These patents include U.S. Patent Nos. 7,402,719, 7,744,829 and 8,106,249.
The patents are entitled “Catalytic oxidative dehydrogenation, and microchannel reactors for catalytic oxidative dehydrogenation” (Dehydrogenation Patents) and cover what appears to be the company’s first generation microchannel reactor technology.
Microchannel reactors contain thousands of millimeter scale channels that quickly dissipate heat from the chemical reactions so more active catalysts can be used. Fischer-Tropsch (FT) reactors use effect heat dissipation by interleaving channels containing catalyst with water-filled coolant channels.Â
According to the Velocys web site:
The use of microchannel processing makes it possible to greatly intensify chemical reactions enabling them to occur at rates 10 to 1000 times faster than in conventional systems.
The Dehydrogenation Patents are directed to apparatus and methods of oxidatively dehydrogenating a gaseous hydrocarbon in which the reaction chamber has walls (6, 6′), a process channel (2) contains a bulk flow path (4), and a heating chamber (10) is adjacent to the process channel (2).
The heating chamber is divided into several regions (7, 9, 13) into which various fluids flow to tailor the temperature profile in a process channel. In one example, the Dehydrogenation Patents state:
[S]team or the return portion of [an oxidative dehydrogenation] stream could flow through region 7 to provide a preheat zone; an endothermic process stream can flow through region 9 to remove heat from the oxidative dehydrogenation reaction in a reaction chamber (a portion of the process channel in which catalyst 15 is present), and a cold fluid flows through region 13 to quench the reaction.
As shown in FIG. 3A of the Oxidative Dehydrogenation Patents, the channels may have apertures (38) forming passageways between channels (36 and 37) to allow flow of a reactant into the endothermic reaction chamber.
Velocys also has more recent patent applications relating to subsequent developments in its microchannel technology, including U.S. Application Publication Nos. 2012/0095268 and 2013/0127093, which includes the claimed step of ultrasonically packing particulates into the microchannels using an ultrasonic densification unit.
The Velocys FT reactor technology was recently selected for a biomass-to-liquids plant to be developed by Red Rock Biofuels and partially funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense.
