Abstract
The effect of water on the solubility of syngas in hydrocarbons has typically been ignored when developing models for Fischer-Tropsch slurry bubble column reactors (SBCR), despite water being a major by-product. Therefore, a generalized correlation was developed to predict water solubility in hydrocarbons at high temperatures, and was used to calculate the effect of water saturation on H2 and CO solubility in hydrocarbons using the Span Wagner equation of state. The presence of water was shown to have a much more significant effect on H2 solubility in hydrocarbons, compared to CO.
Highlights
The effect of the presence of water on syngas solubility in Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) Slurry Bubble Column Reactors (SBCR) has received little attention, despite water being a major by-product
The purpose of this work is to determine the solubility of water in various hydrocarbons using thermodynamic models, and to develop a generalized correlation for determining water solubility in hydrocarbons, which can be used to estimate the effect of water saturation on the solubility of CO and H2 in hydrocarbons
Results for H2 solubility in water saturated and unsaturated hydrocarbons is shown in Figure 2, and as can be seen in this figure, the solubility of H2 is higher in water saturated hydrocarbons, and the effect of water saturation significantly increases with increasing temperatures
Summary
The effect of the presence of water on syngas solubility in Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) Slurry Bubble Column Reactors (SBCR) has received little attention, despite water being a major by-product. There have been numerous investigations to measure solubilities and mass transfer parameters of CO and H2 in F-T hydrocarbon fractions and slurries under a variety of operating conditions, the effect of water is typically neglected. In most of the F-T SBCR models, liquid properties are typically determined for pure hydrocarbons or hydrocarbon mixtures, while disregarding the effect of water saturation on the physical properties of the hydrocarbons or on the gas solubilities. Lindenberg [3] and McAuliff [4] observed an empirical relationship between the logarithms of aqueous solubility of water in hydrocarbons at room temperature and the hydrocarbon molar volume for homologous series. Other investigations have correlated water solubility with a variety of readily measured or calculated physical properties such as the octanol/water partition coefficient, normal boiling point, chromatographic retention indices, and molecular surface area and volume. Several studies [7,8] demonstrated a mechanistic relationship between the solubility and the molecular surface area of the hydrocarbon solute, Schatzberg [9] correlated the solubility of water in hydrocarbons ranging from paraffins to n-hexadecane at 298 and 313 K with solute surface tension
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