Chemical vapor infiltration of pyrocarbon from methane pyrolysis: kinetic modeling with texture formation

A complete mechanism of methane pyrolysis is proposed for chemical vapor infiltration of pyrocarbon with different textures, which contains a detailed homogeneous mechanism for gas reactions and a lumped heterogeneous mechanism for pyrocarbon deposition. This model is easily applied to simulate gas compositions and pyrocarbon deposition in a vertical hot-wall flow reactor in the temperature range of 1,323–1,398 K without any adjusting parameters and presents better results than previous mechanisms. Results have shown that the consumption of methane and the production of hydrogen are well enhanced due to pyrocarbon deposition. Pyrocarbon deposition prevents the continuously increasing of acetylene composition and leads to the reduction in the mole fraction of benzene at long residence times in the gas phase. The carbon growth with active sites on the surface is the controlling mechanism of pyrocarbon deposition. C ₁ species is the precursor of pyrocarbon deposition at 1,323 K, and the primary source over the whole temperature range. As temperature increases, gas phase becomes more mature and depositions from acetylene, benzene and polyaromatic hydrocarbons become more prevalent. A general pyrocarbon formation mechanism is derived with the specific precursors and illustrates that the maturation of gas compositions is beneficial to forming planar structures with hexagonal rings or pentagon-heptagon pairs, namely, high textured pyrocarbon. The results are in well agreement with experiments.