Intrinsic kinetics and industrial reactors modelling for the dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene on promoted iron oxide catalysts

Abstract

In this preliminary investigation two approaches are used to obtain intrinsic kinetics for the catalytic dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene on different promoted iron oxide catalysts: (1) A rigorous heterogeneous model based on the dusty gas model for the catalyst pellets is used to extract intrinsic kinetics from the data of an industrial reactor. (2) A pseudohomogeneous model is used to extract intrinsic kinetics from the results of a laboratory fixed bed reactor packed with in-house prepared powder catalysts with negligible diffusional resistances. The extracted intrinsic kinetics were used in the heterogeneous model to simulate the industrial reactor and the results for the three in-house prepared catalysts are compared with those of the industrial reactor.