Silica membrane reactors for hydrogen production from water gas shift

This paper presents an analysis of membrane reactor (MR) operation and design for enhanced hydrogen production from the water gas shift (WGS) reaction. It has been established that membrane reactors can enhance an equilibrium limited reaction through product separation. However, the detailed effects of reactor setup, membrane configuration and catalyst volume have yet to be properly analysed for this reaction. This paper investigates new ideas for membrane reactors such as the development of new catalytic films, for improved interaction between the reaction and separation zones. Current membrane reactors utilise a packed bed of catalyst within the membrane tube, utilising a large volume of catalyst to drive reaction. This is still inefficient and provides only limited benefits over conventional WGS reactors. New reactor configurations look to optimise the interactive effects between reaction and separation to provide improved operation. In this paper, thin film catalysts were produced using dip coating and spray coating techniques. This technique produced catalyst coatings with good thickness, though the abrasion strength of the dip coated catalyst was quite low. The catalyst was tested in a packed bed reactor for temperature activity at low temperatures and catalyst activity at varying levels of excess water

On the relative complexity of labelled modal tableaux

We investigate the relative complexity of two free-variable labelled modal tableaux(KEM and Single Step Tableaux, SST). We discuss the reasons why p-simulation is not a proper measure of the relative complexity of tableaux-like proof systems, and we propose an improved comparison scale (p-search-simulation). Finally we show that KEM p-search-simulates SST while SST cannot p-search-simulate KEM.