Trickle-bed reactors scaling down

D. van Herk, M.T. Kreutzer, M. Makkee, J.A. Moulijn, Scaling down trickle bed reactors, Catal. Today 106 (2005) 227. 

Hydrodynamics, mass, and heat transfer in the commonly used three-phase fixed-bed reactors were briefly outlined. Also, scale-up rules and alternative ways to scale down trickle-bed reactors are discussed. In spite of the extensive studies on the hydrodynamics, mass, and heat transfer in three-phase fixed-bed reactors, clearly, a lot of work remains to be done in providing a fundamentally based description of the effect of pressure on the parameters of importance in three-phase fixed-bed reactors operation, design, and scale-up or scale-down. It is evident that atmospheric data and models/correlations cannot, in general, be extrapolated to operation at elevated pressures. The physics conveyed by the standard two-phase flow models is minimalistic because it insufficiently describes the role and presence of interfaces and their thermodynamic properties. The explicit inclusion of interfaces and interfacial properties is essential because they are known to have a significant role in determining the thermodynamic state of the whole system. 

Scale rules of laboratory trickle-bed reactors are discussed. The scale rules are important in the scaling up of a novel process investigated in the laboratory to industrial process and in scaling down of laboratory test reactor with the aim of increasing cost effectiveness while maintaining the meaningfulness of the data generated in industrial practice [111]. 

In principle there are the following alternative ways to scale down the industrial trickle-bed reactors down-scale according to geometric similarity, industrial reactor representation by... 

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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