UC Irvine

Industrial process heating is responsible for a substantial share of global CO2 emissions, and decarbonizing it requires replacing fuel-fired furnaces with electrified alternatives that can be powered by renewable electricity. Induction heating (IH) has emerged as a promising candidate for electrifying endothermic catalytic reactions because it heats a conductive susceptor directly and rapidly through an oscillating magnetic field, avoiding the slow, diffuse heat transfer of conventional furnace heating (CFH). A growing body of literature has reported that IH improves catalytic activity, selectivity, and stability relative to CFH across a range of reactions, but the origin of these improvements has remained unresolved: proposed explanations range from improved temperature uniformity and localized micro-hotspots to a direct, non-thermal interaction between the oscillating electromagnetic field and the catalytic surface. This mechanistic ambiguity motivates the central investigation of this dissertation, which uses propane dehydrogenation (PDH) and catalytic methane decomposition (CMD) as model reactions, both selected for their well-characterized kinetics and deactivation pathways under conventional heating, to systematically isolate the physical origin of IH's catalytic effects and determine whether they can be deliberately engineered.Catalytic testing of Pt-based PDH catalysts under IH showed propylene selectivity improved by up to 20% and coke formation reduced by up to 0.97 wt% relative to CFH at matched propane conversion near 600 °C, while static magnetic field control experiments up to 100 mT showed no effect on activity or selectivity, ruling out a direct electromagnetic mechanism and instead implicating transient coil-current oscillations (0.25-0.5 Hz) that produced temperature swings of up to 22 °C at the catalyst bed center. This dynamic-thermal-effect hypothesis was confirmed as a general phenomenon, rather than a reaction-specific artifact, when the same transient thermal oscillations were shown to govern carbon speciation and suppress deactivation in Fe/Al2O3-catalyzed methane decomposition, sustaining steady-state CH4 conversions up to 43% higher than CFH in a chemically distinct reaction governed by carburization rather than surface coking. Building on this mechanistic understanding, a subsequent investigation of coupled susceptor-catalyst architectures in PDH demonstrated that IH's benefits can be engineered rather than treated as fixed: reducing the void-region susceptor stainless-steel bead count from 10 to 3 while holding catalyst chemistry constant raised propylene selectivity by 15% at matched conversion, showing that catalytic heat delivery within the bed and non-catalytic gas-phase cracking in the surrounding void volume act as two independently tunable levers. Overall, these findings establish that IH's advantage over CFH can be leveraged from deliberately engineering thermal non-uniformity – both spatially and temporally – rather than solely electromagnetic effect, providing a mechanistic and architectural framework for the rational design of electrified reactors for industrial decarbonization.