Modelling of Carbon Black oxidation in the presence of CeO2 catalyst using a 3D representation of the solid–solid mixture.

A model based on a 3D representation of mixtures involving Carbon Black (CB) and commercial ceria (CeO 2 ) particles placed in a fixed bed reactor is proposed. Catalyst particles may aggregate in different ways in the whole bed and different CB–CeO 2 mass ratios are considered which range from 95–5 to 10–90. Two types of oxidation are assigned by the model: a catalytic oxidation under the influence of CeO 2 and a non-catalytic one in the other case. The activation energies of these oxidation processes have been determined through experiments, while their frequency factors are derived for the two reactions using a numerical simulation. The model simulates the CB oxidation in a good way whatever the CB–CeO 2 mass ratio, except for the 50–50 case. The catalytic oxidation is here underestimated, as the contact between CB and CeO 2 is progressively lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]