Simulation of the Industrial Packed Bed Catalytic Reactor for the Partial Oxidation of Methanol to Formaldehyde:

Abstract

AbstractA detailed diffusion‐reaction kinetic model was developed in this study for an industrial methanol partial oxidation reactor. Unlike, most of the kinetic models in the literature that either neglected or approximated the intra‐particle diffusion, the details of the mass transfer limitations were taken into consideration for this reaction system. The catalyst pellet was modeled using the rigorous dusty gas model based on Stefan‐Maxwell equations. Four reactions are considered and an efficient minimization routine was used to extract the kinetic rate coefficients for these reactions using industrial reactor data.