Periodic operation is an attractive mode of reactor operation since higher conversion and selectivity may be achieved as compared with a steady state mode of operation. There are several variables that could be changed in a periodic operation. Inlet concentration has been often chosen as the variable to be changed in many experimental studies. However, there are only few works on the forced temperature cycling. This is because the thermal inertia of the reactor does not allow the reactor temperature to respond quickly to the heater/cooling medium operation.

Recently several attempts have been made to apply microreactors to forced temperature cycling. At the University of Tokushima, we have successfully realized forced temperature cycling at a very low energy cost. With this reactor, behaviour of the oxidation of propylene was examined and demonstrated that forced temperature cycling can be used to control the conversion. In fact the conversion was higher under periodic condition as compared with the steady state operation with identical energy input for the heater. However, it was extremely difficult to analyse the phenomena behind the increase in the conversion, since the reaction consists of so many elementary reactions.

The objective of the present study is to study the behavior of carbon monoxide oxidation under forced temperature cycling. Since this reaction is much simpler than the propylene oxidation, the collected data can be used to analyse the mechanism of the conversion increase.