Fixed Bed Reactors SO2 Oxidation

Sulfuric acid production was for decades the industrialization index of any country due to its use for the production of a number of chemicals from dyes to explosives. The first method available was the lead chambers by Rosenbrock in 1746. The need for more concentrated sulfuric acid improved the process with the addition of the Gay-Lussac Tower in 1835 and the Glover tower in 1859. However, the concentration of sulfuric acid, around 60%, was not enough for the growing ch ical industry. Thus, the contact method was developed based on heterogeneous catalysis. The method consists of obtaining SO2 from sulfur or pyrite by burning them. The next stage involves the equilibrium  

The problem statement is as follows. We use sulfur as raw material for the production of sulfuric acid. After burning the sulfur, the composition that we feed to the converter can be seen in Table 4.1. 

Assume that we have a packed bed reactor using V2O5 in a pipe of 2 in 12 BWG (internal diameter is 0.0453 m). The volumetric flow rate is assumed to be 30.48 mV min m [14] and the operation is recommended from 400 C and 600°C so that the reaction occurs at a reasonable rate without energy transfer problems. The converters 

Operate close to atmosphere we assume that we feed the gas at 202 kPa. The initial flow rate is 0.0215 mol/s of the mixture. Determine the length of the tube (the mass of catalyst whose density is 542 kg/m ) to obtain a conversion of SO2 of 85%. 

We can proceed in two ways the iterative one, the easiest to start with, and a more complex one based on the solution of a differential algebraic system using an error function. In this example, we focus on the first one and leave the second as an exercise to the reader. We start with modeling the reactor following the principles in Fogler [15] where a similar problem but for the design of a complete multitubular reactor can be found using polymath. 

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