Reactor types, various, methanol

Fig.3.3a-d. Various types of methanol synthesis reactors, (a) Cold gas quench (b) cooling by evaporation - multistage, adiabatic (c) cooling by evaporation - tubular, near isothermal (d) liquid entrained system using heat carrier liquid... 

The chromatographic SMB reactor has been examined for various reaction systems, with the main focus on reactions of the type A + B C + D. Examples are esterifications of acetic acid with methanol (Lode et al., 2003b), ethanol (Mazotti et al., 1996a) and (5-phenethyl alcohol (Kawase et al., 1996) as well as the production of bisphenol A (Kawase et al., 1999). The same reaction type can also be found for various hydrocarbons, such as the transfer reaction of sucrose with lactose to lactosuc-rose (Kawase et al., 2001) and the hydrolysis of lactose (Shieh and Barker, 1996). Barker et al. (1992) focused on reactions of the type A B + C, such as enzyme-catalyzed sucrose inversion and the production of dextran. Also, reactions of the type A tB have been investigated, e.g. isomerization of glucose to fructose by Fricke (2005) as well as Tuomi and Engell (2004). Michel et al. (2003) have examined the application of electrochemical SMB reactors for consecutive reactions and used as an example the production of arabinose. 

Let us - after these rather extensive introductory remarks -turn to the specific problems encountered in design of ammonia and methanol synthesis reactors. We shall not endeavour to treat all of the above mentioned aspects, but mainly concentrate on the initial steps and on the basis of this illustrate how the various principal types of reactors can be applied in these syntheses. We shall discuss the reaction kinetics for the reactions and the calculation of reactor performance and some of the problems encountered in the calculation of reactor performance. The mathematical procedure used for the computer calculations is discussed by Christiansen and Jarvan W in a separate presentation in this volume. 

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