Well-type Screening Reactors

A new alternative approach for Stage I screening in liquid phase is the use of bubble column-type reactors. These parallel bubble columns can operate in batch and fed-batch mode regarding the reaction mixture, while a continuous stream of gas is used as reactant (H2, 02, or others) as well as for the intense agitation of the reaction mixture (Figure 11.39). 

Perforated plate distributors are widely used in industry because they are cheap and relatively easy to manufacture. Simple perforated plate-type distributors suffer from particles passing back through to the plenum despite mean gas velocities well above the settling velocity for the particles. This is because of imbalances in gas flow between the orifices, which is difficult to eliminate. Hence, such plates take the form of either a layer of mesh sandwiched between two perforated plates or two staggered perforated plates without a mesh screen (Kunii and Levenspiel, 1991). However, these structures often lack rigidity and need to be reinforced or sometimes curved (concave to the bed) to withstand heavy loads. The diameter of the orifices in a perforated plate distributor varies from 1 or 2mm in small beds used for research or very small-scale production to 50 mm in very large chemical reactors. Most food applications are likely to use apertures of intermediate size. 

Figure 3.34 Parallel reactor for catalyst screening of wafer-type substrates and silicon wafer supply manifold for the distribution of the reactants to the 256 wells [7]...

In the isomerization of styrene oxides in a fixed bed reactor under gas phase conditions, the catalytic performance of various catalysts on the activity, selectivity and service time was screened at 300°C and WHSV = 2-3h" . As shown in Fig. 15.1, zeolites with MFI-structure are superior to other zeolite types and non zeolitic molecular sieves, as well as greatly superior to amorphous metal oxides. 

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