Abstract
IN 1932 Travers and Hockin described a phenomenon associated with the formation of methane and of condensation products during the pyrolysis of pure ethane1. When this gas is heated to the neighbourhood of 600°, ethylene and hydrogen are formed very rapidly, and a state is approached rapidly approximating to equilibrium in the ethane-ethylene-hydrogen system. Methane and condensation products are also formed, and as Travers and Pearce show in a paper which will shortly appear in the Transactions of the Society of Chemical Industry, both processes originate independently from the ethylene. When the pyrolysis has proceeded for a short time, the rates of formation of methane and of condensate suddenly and simultaneously slow down. However, if instead of using pure ethane, a mixture of ethane, ethylene and hydrogen in equilibrium proportions is used, no breaks are observed in the graphs representing the rates of formation of methane and condensate at all. The initial rate of both processes is definitely greater when starting from pure ethane than when starting from an equilibrium mixture, and while in the former case the processes are markedly affected by surface, in the latter the effect of surface appears to be negligible.
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Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 136, 1; 1932.
NATURE, 131, 24, Jan. 7, 1933.
Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 146, 252; 1934.
Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 143, 16; 1933.
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TRAVERS, M., SEDDON, R. & GAY, P. Cause of Changes in Rate of some Gas Reactions. Nature 134, 662 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134662a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134662a0
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