The reactor for performance evaluation and dynamic test of catalyst

1 The reactor for performance evaluation and dynamic test of catalyst 

All catalytic reactions should be implemented in the reactor, and evaluation and dynamic test of catalysts also should be carried out in the bench scale reactor. The bench scale reactor is the simulation and micromation of large-scale industrial reactor. Because lab reactor is research not production, it needs higher and more severe requirements than industrial reactor when observing and measuring catalytic reaction, and it has to have much more careful considerations on design, operation and control. However, in practice, researchers only consider the variety of special demands to design reactors. 

In a common industrial heterogeneous catalytic reactor, the data need to include chemical reactions and physical transfer (heat transfer, mass transfer) in varying degrees. It is very difficult to evaluate whether the performance of catalyst is good or not, or to find the way to improve the performance of catalyst according to these combined data. Therefore, it is necessary to dismiss them from the coupling of chemical reactions and physical transfer via appropriate research tools and conditions, to 

In the various lab reactors, some are suitable to get the dynamics data, some are not. This is according to the following three requirements. Firstly, the most important reaction condition is its isothermal characteristic because the effect of temperature on reaction rate is exponential, especially to complicated reaction. For a few simple reactions, the exact temperature distribution sometimes can be used as supplementary information on the dynamics, but that is a special case of the individual secondly, the tangibility and uniformity of the settle-time thirdly, whether the sampling and analysis of products is easy or not. The above three points decide the quality of the reactor, which also further decide the precision of dynamic model. 

The lab reactor is the core of catalyst evaluation and dynamic test equipments. Various methods and special reactors have been developed.  

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