That would probably make sense. Once the reaction kicked off, it was the classic runaway that I learned about in college. By the way, my reaction two doesn't balance, its supposed to be 3 hydrogens, not 3/2.
I believe that there was little or no hydrogenation going on, since we only had a little bit of hydrogen (less than 0.5%), but from the severely coked catalyst that we pulled out of the reactor, it appears that there was alot of de-hydrogenation. That's why I was thinking that the Nickel acted...
It was meant to be a desulfurization catalyst, but it appears that it dehydrogenated the feed stream to the point of coking in a very short period of time. The coke was either in a dust form or a mass of black solids. The sulfur species are typically trace amounts (5 ppm)of light mercaptans...
We recently installed a nickel oxide catalyst bed to remove trace amounts of sulfur from a gas stream that is 65%Ethane/35%Ethylene at the following temp. & pressure:
P=360 psig (about 25 atmospheres)
T=60 F
We ran into numerous problems, (high exotherm, byproducts of hydrogen, CO, CO2...
