On the development of new column internals for reactive separations via integration of CFD and process simulation

Abstract

Reactive separations combining mass transfer with simultaneous chemical reactions impose additional requirements on the applied column internals. Traditionally, reactive separation processes have been optimised via operational parameter adjustment. By this way, a direct influence of the internals geometry and structure cannot be taken into consideration. Therefore, the application of process-specific column internals, rather than of the internals currently available on the market, is desirable. Development of new internals is a major focus of interest in an European project entitled Intelligent Column Internals for Reactive Separations. In particular, such development is achieved by the application of modern CFD facilities combined with the rigorous, rate-based process simulation. An important challenge is to provide an opportunity of obtaining hydrodynamic and mass-transfer correlations, necessary for the process description, not only from the experimental measurements, but also directly from the CFD simulations. In this paper, a way to generate virtual correlations is demonstrated for a single-phase flow through structured packings. The rate-based simulation is illustrated with the heterogeneously catalysed synthesis of n-hexyl acetate via reactive distillation.