Gas-liquid flow characterization and mass transfer study in a microreactor for oligomerization catalyst testing

Abstract

The acceleration of the development of ethylene oligomerization processes by homogeneous catalysis requires a complete characterization of the catalytic system. This work proposes to use segmented gas-liquid flow in microchannels to achieve high experimental throughput for catalyst testing.Gas-liquid flow was studied in order to validate the microreactor setup. Results showed that bubble and slug lengths vary linearly with the superficial velocities ratio following the Garstecki et al. model [21]. The impact of lateral feed in Taylor flow was explored to mimic the catalyst feed in an oligomerization test. The experiments showed that the volume of the liquid slugs increased proportionally to the additional flow rate, thereby suggesting that the majority of the liquid in the lateral feed is ultimately retained in the liquid slug.A study of mass transfer showed that the volumetric mass transfer coefficient is between 0.27 and 0.55 s−1. These values lead to a Hatta number < 0.5, thus confirming the possibility of conducting the ethylene oligomerization reaction in the chemical kinetic regime.Finally, an ethylene oligomerization test performed in the microreactor showed that the continuous microreactor system can be used for catalyst screening purpose.