| Monolithic Reactor And Particle-Packed Monolithic Reactor For Three-Phase Catalytic Reactions | ||
| Tobias Bauer1, Stefan Haase1, Muthanna H. Al-Dahhan2 and Ruediger Lange1, (1)Department of Chemical Engineering, Dresden Universtiy of Technology, Dresden, 01062, Germany, (2)Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Washington University in Saint Louis, One Brookings Drive, Saint Louis, MO 63130 Recent research has shown that monolithic reactors with gas-liquid flow in regular minichannels with a fixed catalyst on the walls can lead to performance enhancement compared to conventional multiphase reactors such as trickle-bed reactors and slurry reactors (Roy et al., 2005). The performance enhancement is mainly attributed to better gas-liquid-solid contact and better mass transfer (Liu, 2002). A novel and promising approach is packing the parallel flow channels of a monolith bed with catalyst particles (Strangio et al., 1999). It is assumed, that the gas-liquid two-phase flow in packed monolith channels lead to further mass transfer improvements either to the monolith walls or to the particles or to both. No study has been reported which investigates the performance of packed monolithic bed reactors characterized with catalyst wall and spherical catalyst particles and which compares such performance with those of monolithic and trickle-bed reactors. Therefore the focus of this study was to evaluate experimentally the performance of a fixed bed reactor packed with (A) monolithic catalyst with active sites fixed on the walls, (B) monolithic catalyst with active sites fixed on the walls and the channels packed with catalyst particles, and (C) typical trickle-bed catalyst. For each of these types of fixed-bed reactors, superficial gas and liquid velocities which provide maximum rate per bed volume are identified. Both, the monolithic reactor and the particle-packed monolithic reactor, were also operated under flow conditions similar to those used in trickle-bed reactors. In addition, pressure drop measurements are carried out in order to assess the energy loss for the operation of each of these fixed-bed reactors. References: Liu, W., (2002). Ministructured Catalyst Bed for Gas-Liquid-Solid Multiphase Catalytic Reaction. AIChE Journal, 48, 1519-1532. Roy, S., Bauer, T., Al-Dahhan, M., Lehner, P., Turek, T., (2004). Monoliths as multiphase reactors: A review. AIChE Journal, 50, 2918-2938. Strangio, V.A.; Dautzenberg F.; Calis, H.P.A., Gupta, A. (1999). "Fixed Catalytic Bed Reactor." WO9948604. Extended Abstract Status: Not Uploaded | ||