Deactivation of the preferential oxidation of CO in packed bed reactor by 3D modelling and near-infrared tomography

Abstract

Scaling up the results on catalyst deactivation to industrial operations, where transport phenomena are of significance, is often not straightforward. The operations of industrial reactors are judiciously focused on the dynamics of the deactivation along the axial length of the reactors, which are generally known approximately. Processes of strong energy release or fast chemical kinetics, such as oxidation reactions, cracking, etc., are associated with a deactivation where the time characteristics of the flow and transports are of magnitudes of the deactivation time-on-stream. Local deactivation of the preferential oxidation of CO was investigated by three-dimensional modelling of flow, mass and heat transfers inside a packed-bed reactor and validated by near-infrared tomography. The profiles of deactivation were sensitive to the rates of deactivation, heat transfer by dispersion and intra-particle mass transfer. At pore scale of the packing, pronounced deactivation was revealed near the wall due to a preferential flow circulation. The deactivation progressed at the exteriors of the catalytic particles, particularly over the regions in contact with the convective flow. Unlike the mass dispersion, the heat dispersion promoted the deactivation by shifting the moving waves of deactivation upstream, leading to asymmetrical maps inside the catalytic particles.