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

Abstract

A detailed diffiion-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 trans@r 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.

Effect of particle shape on methanol partial oxidation in a fixed bed using CFD reactor modeling

“…Since the simulation is carried out under laminar flow conditions at Re p = 300 no turbulence model is used in this study. This flow rate is typical of industrial conditions …”

“…All particles are 0.0045 m in diameter and height. The rings inner diameter is 0.0012 m as reported by Moustafa . The Bullet Physics library as implemented in Blender with the packed bed generator (PBG) front end is used to generate all the packings for the different particle shapes.…”

“…This flow rate is typical of industrial conditions. 32 Multicomponent transport of N sp species in the fluid and solid phases is modeled by defining N sp − 1 user defined scalars (ϕ k ) in ANSYS Fluent to represent the mass fractions of the species according to the solid particle method. 38 At steady-state in the fluid phase the kth scalar satisfies…”

“…The rings inner diameter is 0.0012 m as reported by Moustafa. 32 The Bullet Physics library as implemented in Blender with the packed bed generator (PBG) front end 41 is used to generate all the packings for the different particle shapes. PBG randomly assigns both the particle location and its orientation (for non-spheres) at the top of the container, before dropping the particle into the tube.…”

“…Moustafa simulated an industrial formaldehyde reactor considering a detailed diffusion–reaction heterogeneous model . The dusty‐gas model was used to describe diffusion inside the isothermal catalyst pellets which were modeled as an equivalent slab geometry.…”