Pressure drop and mass transfer study in structured catalytic packings

Abstract

In this work, two types of structured catalytic packings (i.e. BH-1 and BH-2 types) were involved. This work tried to identify the relationship between geometric configuration and performance of pressure drop and mass transfer coefficients for BH-1 and BH-2 types by means of the combination of experiments and computational fluid dynamics (CFDs). The cold model experimental results showed that under the same operating conditions pressure drops for BH-1 and BH-2 types were significantly lower than those for conventional fixed-bed reactor packed with pellet catalyst particles by one to three orders of magnitude. A 3-D CFD model (i.e. Eulerian multiphase model) was established to study the separation performance of structured catalytic packings in this work. On this basis, the design parameters of structured catalytic packings were optimized by adjusting the corrugation angle, the ratio of height to diameter and the area ratio of separation to reaction regions. Two kinds of transition structures were proposed and the calculated results revealed that they were favorable when considering pressure drop and mass transfer coefficient together. Furthermore, it was found that a low ratio of packing height to diameter was favorable for increasing mass transfer coefficient, but leads to increasing pressure drop like common structured packings; a low area ratio of separation to reaction region for BH-1 type would increase mass transfer coefficient and decrease pressure drop simultaneously.