Thermal decomposition of biphenyl and naphthalene in a flow system

✍ Scribed by J. Lahaye; H.B. Palmer; R.K. Sharma

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1968
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 159 KB
• Volume: 6
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0008-6223
• DOI: 10.1016/0008-6223(68)90037-7

✦ Synopsis

THIS note briefly reports some experiments on the pyrolysis of biphenyl and naphthalene, using a hot flow reactor of the type used in some previous studies of hydrocarbon decomposition."-8) As there is little literature on the decomposition of biphenyl(4) or naphthalene,(s* 6) in the gas phase, it seemed worthwhile to examine them. We have used as starting materials the commercial products of very high purity. The experiments on biphenyl cover a range of temperature from about 1120°K to 1320°K and a range of concentrations (at ca. 740 torr pressure) from 0.20 to 1.4 per cent by vol. in helium carrier gas. For naphthalene, the ranges are smaller : 1120 to 12 70°K and 0.95 to 1.8 per cent.

Attempts to determine the overall kinetic order of decomposition by varying the input concentrations yielded ambiguous results in both cases. There is some evidence that the order in the early stages may be approximately unity. Hence, in order to report some quantitative indication of the behavior, we have arbitrarily treated the data according to first-order kinetics and have calculated apparent first-order constants at all experimental temperatures using the per cent decomposition at a fixed, relatively short contact time. The results are shown on the Arrhenius plot in Fig. 1, together with the *Work supported in part by grant from the J. M.