A water-cooled fixed bed Fischer-Tropsch reactor packed with Fe-HZSM5 catalyst has been modeled in two dimensions (radial and axial) using the intrinsic reaction rates previously developed at RIPI. The reactor is used for production of highoctane gasoline from synthesis gas. The Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reactor was a shell and tube type with high pressure boiling water circulating on the shell side. By the use of a two-dimensional model, the effects of some important operating parameters such as cooling temperature, H 2 /CO ratio in syngas and reactor tube diameter on the performance capability of the reactor were investigated. Based on these results, the optimum operating conditions and the tube specification were determined. The model has been used to estimate the optimum operating conditions for the pilot plant to be operated in RIPI.

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In this work, steady state and dynamic performances of quaternary distillation column sequences designed based on steady state and dynamic cost functions have been investigated. To quantify the dynamic performance, product losses due to disturbances have been considered in the objective function. In addition, variations of operating costs such as utilities have been considered in the objective function. To separate a quaternary mixture into four products, 22 configurations have been used. It has been observed that the feed composition, disturbance frequency and magnitude affect the dynamic behavior strongly. To decrease the optimization computational load, a scheme that provides a suboptimal result has been proposed. By performing simultaneous optimization that requires much more computational time, it has been shown that the highest ranking configurations obtained by the proposed method are the same as those provided by simultaneous technique. The simulation results indicate that there is no clear pattern for configuration ranking based on column sequence specifications.