Successful Scale-up of an Industrial Trickle Bed Hydrogenation Using Laboratory Reactor Data

Abstract

This work validates the appropriate application of chemical reaction engineering principles in the successful design of a full-scale industrial trickle bed reactor for a proprietary hydrogenation reaction over a palladium catalyst. After identifying an effective catalyst formulation in a continuous laboratory scale trickle bed reactor, the project team used the same small-scale reactor to generate kinetic data for scale-up. The scale factor from the laboratory to the final design was about 3 × 106. The development effort identified and resolved three important problems: (1) incomplete catalyst wetting of the small catalyst bed, even though the catalyst was diluted with inert fines; (2) lower than economically attractive catalyst productivity; and (3) catalyst deactivation.