Articles techniques et présentations

Oxygen transfer through ceramic membranes at high-temperature can substantially reduce costs respect to conventional separation methods. With the aim to improve the determination of the properties of the ceramic materials, a lab-scale permeation set-up was modeled using the Chemical Engineering Module of COMSOL Multiphysics®. The solution required the coupling of three domains. Gas flow was laminar and it was modeled using the Navier-Stokes equations. Oxygen transport was modeled using the convection and diffusion mode, Maxwell-Stephan diffusion, and diffusion of oxygen vacancies which is the relevant transport mechanism in the membrane. The model was used to perform a parametric study of the geometry and to adjust the vacancy diffusion coefficient that produced a better approximation to the experimental results.