Electrified thermochemical reaction engineering with metamaterial reactors

The electrification of thermochemical reactors presents an opportunity to not only decarbonize high-grade heat generation but also to customize heating and heat transfer processes in a manner that facilitates process intensification and enhanced conversion. We present metamaterial reactors that use the high-frequency magnetic induction of axially tailored metamaterial baffles to produce customized axial heating profiles. The baffle consists of a combinatorial sequence of two types of lattices each with distinctive heating properties, and the sequence can be inverse designed around the reaction engineering properties of the reactor to produce temperature profiles tailored for a given reaction, flow condition, and maximum temperature. We use these metamaterial reactors to enhance the temperature uniformity in a set of packed bed flow reactors, each driving the reverse water gas shift reaction under different maximum temperature and flow conditions, demonstrating systematic increases in conversion compared to uniformly heated systems. These concepts encapsulate new opportunities in electrified thermochemical reaction engineering in which electrified powering is codesigned with reaction and heat transfer processes to enhance chemical conversion.