Establishment of light‐dependent photo‐thermal kinetic model for methane dry reforming and performance optimization in a cavity reactor

Abstract Solar methane dry reforming (MDR) reaction is a highly promising technology for long‐term energy storage due to its eco‐friendly nature and high‐value‐added product. Numerous present works mainly focused on the photo‐thermal catalysts, few of them discussed photo‐thermal coupled kinetics. Therefore, this article proposed a light‐dependent kinetic model for MDR. In the model, not only the effect of temperature and species concentration were included, but also the radiation was considered, which is different from the conventional kinetic model. Solar radiation is divided into thermal‐effect and light‐promoted‐effect part and coupled with the heat and mass transportation and chemical reaction. The average relative error of established model is only 0.97% under dark condition, and 13.2% under light condition. Then, the impacts of operating condition in a cavity reactor were investigated by established coupled optical‐photo‐thermal dynamics–computational fluid dynamic model to improve the efficiency of chemical conversion. The results show that when GHSV is 48.21 h −1 , light increased the reaction rate by 1.59 times and thermochemical energy storage efficiency by 18.5%. When CH 4 /CO 2 = 1, the formation rates of syngas and thermochemical energy storage efficiency are the highest. This work provides a highly coupled photo‐thermal kinetic model and a method for modeling and condition optimization.