Review of Slurry Bed Reactor for Carbon One Chemistry

Abstract

The slurry bed reactor has many advantages, which make it very suitable for gas-to-liquid processes, especially for the highly exothermic reactions. This chapter reviews three types of slurry bed reactors and their comparisons, including the mechanically stirred slurry reactor, bubble column slurry reactor and three-phase fluidized bed reactor. The application of the slurry bed reactors in carbon one (C1) chemistry for syngas conversion to different valuable chemicals is presented, which includes four typical exothermic reactions, that is, the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis to oil, methanol synthesis, dimethyl ether synthesis and synthetic natural gas synthesis. The operation parameters and performance of slurry bed reactor, fixed bed reactor and fluidized bed reactor are compared while discussing the reasons of catalyst deactivation. Since, the development trend of slurry bed reactor for C1 chemistry is finally proposed.