Heterogeneous process flow reactors, characteristics

Dispersed catalysts are defined as heterogeneous catalysts flowing alrnig with the reactants in a reactor system. The residence time of catalyst and reactants are thus equivalent and consequently, a continuous renewal of the catalyst-reactant interface is afforded. They demonstrate their usefulness in case of competitive fast deactivation or when accessibility of reactants to catalyst surface is hampered by feed characteristics. This kind of situation typically correi nds to heavy feeds processing, and effectively, the use of dispersed catalysts is practically limited to coal liquefaction and petroleum residues conversion. 

Trickle-bed reactors, wherein gas and liquid reactants are contacted in a co-current down flow mode in the presence of heterogeneous catalysts, are used in a large number of industrial chemical processes. Being a multiphase catalytic reactor with complex hydrodynamics and mass transfer characteristics, the development of a generalized model for predicting the performance of such reactors is still a difficult task. However, due to its direct relevance to industrial-scale processes, several important aspects with respect to the influence of external and intraparticle mass transfer effects, partial wetting of catalyst particles and heat effects have been studied previously (Satterfield and Way (1972) Hanika et. al., (1975,1977,1981) Herskowitz and Mosseri (1983)). The previous work has mainly addressed the question of catalyst effectiveness under isothermal conditions and for simple kinetics. It is well known that most of the industrially important reactions represent complex reaction kinetics and very often multistep reactions. Very few attempts have been made on experimental verification of trickle-bed reactor models for multistep catalytic reactions in the previous work. 

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