The extraction and consumption of fossil carbon to run our daily lives account for over 6 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions each year driving climate change. The abundant availability of energy from the sun provides a rich opportunity space to develop and engineer solar-driven photochemical processes for converting waste CO2 into fuels and feedstocks through photothermal catalysis. While photocatalytic production of “solar fuels” has been a research topic for over 20 years, current reactors in the published literature report very low productivity, and this technology has not yet transitioned from the lab to the commercial market. These low productivities are primarily due to sub-optimal light and reactant delivery and under-utilized catalyst material in current photoreactor designs. The HI-Light platform presents a new “shell-and-tube” reactor approach taking advantage of nanostructured catalysts and improved mass and energy transport to overcome these challenges and produce CO at a much more productive rate. The innovative claim of the HI-Light reactor design derives from the concurrent optimization of light-coupling and catalyst availability. Reverse water–gas shift (RWGS) presents an attractive approach for CO2 conversion to CO, and CO could be further used in both methanol synthesis and downstream Fischer–Tropsch process for making liquid hydrocarbons. Using RWGS as a pilot reaction, the HI-Light reactor coupled with Bi-doped defect laden indium oxide based catalyst system has demonstrated a 3x increase for CO conversion when compared with thermal equilibrium conditions, under industrial relevant temperatures and ambient pressure, showing a great potential for industrial applications.

Beyond thermal equilibrium: A HI-Light reactor for reverse water-gas shift reaction

2019 Spring National Meeting

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