Drop Tube Furnace - DTF

A drop tube furnace, DTF, is a type of reactor in which the feedstock is introduced at the top of a ceramic tube placed inside an electrically preheated furnace and then allowed to fall toward the bottom. The drop tube furnace operates at atmosperic pressure and can be fed with both powders and liquids.

The DTF is a flexible system that can be used for fundamental reasearch on thermochemical processes, as both temperature and gas atmospere can be varied inside the reactor. Experiments can be performed at very small scales with a feed rate of only a few grams per hour, which ensures that the feedstock does not significantly affect the temperature or gas composition. This is useful, for example, when studying of ash chemistry during thermochemical conversion during well-defined operating conditions.

Experiments can also be performed att higher feed rates, a few grams per minute, allowing thermochemical process such as combustion, gasification and pyrolysis of various feedstocks to be studied on a small scale to a relatively low cost. Other processes such as calcination, iron combustion and carbon black production are additional examples of application where the drop tube furnace has previosly been used.

At RISE in Piteå, several drop tube furnaces of different sizes are available. The temperatures in these reactors can be set up to 1700 °C, and experiments can be conducted with gas atmosperes consisting of, for example, CO2, N2, O2, CH4, Air and etc.

References from previous work.

Molinder, R and Wiinikka H, Feeding small biomass particles at low rates

Entrained Flow Gasification of Polypropylene Pyrolysis Oil

Structure of carbon black continuously produced from biomass pyrolysis oil

Influence of Feedstock Water Content on Renewable Carbon Black Production Through High-Temperature Pyrolysis of Upgraded Bio-Oils

Iron as recyclable electrofuel: Effect on particle morphology from multiple combustion-regeneration cycles