Gas‐Phase Dehydrogenation of Perhydro Benzyltoluene Using a Commercial Pt on Alumina Catalyst–Stability and Kinetics

The liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC) technology allows storage and transportation of hydrogen using the existing infrastructure for fossil fuels. At times and locations of hydrogen demand, the latter is released from the hydrogen‐rich perhydro benzyltoluene (H12‐BT) in an endothermic dehydrogenation reaction. This hydrogen release reaction typically uses fixed‐bed reactors, with H12‐BT being fed as liquid to the reactor but evaporating at least partly under the applied process conditions due to the hydrogen release. Thus, a significant part of the H12‐BT dehydrogenation takes place as a heterogeneously catalyzed gas‐phase reaction. While a number of kinetic investigations have been published for H12‐BT dehydrogenation, these have so far only focused on liquid‐phase reactions. This article addresses this lack of information by investigating the rate of the gas‐phase dehydrogenation of H12‐BT as a function of the applied process conditions. Our work uses a commercial Pt on alumina catalyst and chooses similar kinetic models as previously applied for the investigation of liquid‐phase reactions to enable a proper comparison of the kinetics in gas‐ and liquid‐phase dehydrogenation. As a result, we find that liquid‐phase dehydrogenation provides higher rates, which encourage operation conditions and reactor designs that minimize LOHC evaporation.