Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.36, No.10, 4421-4426, 1997
Assessment of the Effects of High-Pressure Operation on the Liquid-Solid Mass-Transfer Coefficient in Trickle-Bed Reactors
Trickle-bed reactors are used widely in industry and are usually operated at high pressure. All the studies on liquid-solid mass transfer in such reactors were performed under atmospheric pressure and, hence, the empirical correlations for liquid-solid mass-transfer coefficients (k(ls) and k(ls)a were developed based on atmospheric data. However, these correlations incorporate one or more of the parameters affected by pressure (e.g., liquid holdup, catalyst wetting efficiency, pressure drop, gas density). In this work the effects of high pressure and high gas flow rates on the predicted coefficients using some of these correlations are evaluated. It is shown that there are discrepancies in the prediction of these correlations, and the use of them at high operating pressure is unjustified. This work is an attempt to bring to the attention of the industrial practitioners the fact that the atmospheric liquid-solid mass-transfer correlations do not exhibit the same trends with increased pressure and some of them do not capture the physics of the system. Thus, experimental investigations to quantify the effect of reactor pressure on k(ls) and k(ls)a and a new correlation for a wide range of operating pressures are needed.
Keywords:PACKED-BEDS;2-PHASE FLOW;FIXED-BED;COCURRENT DOWNFLOW;ELEVATED PRESSURES;GAS;SATURATION;HYDRODYNAMICS