Trickle-bed reactor isothermal, current models

Mil.I S AND DUDUKOVlC Isothermal Trickle-Bed Reactors Current Models 39... 

A Comparison of Current Models for Isothermal Trickle-Bed Reactors... 

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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