CFD analysis of bed textural characteristics on TBR behaviour: Kinetics, scaling‐up, multiscale analysis, and wall effects

A simulation of a trickle bed reactor aided by computational fluid dynamics was implemented. With a Eulerian approach, geometrical characteristics were explicitly considered and two simultaneous heterogeneous reactions were included, hydrodesulphurization (HDS) and hydrodenitrogenation (HDN). This was performed in order to achieve the following: (1) attain further insight into a proper scaling‐up procedure to be able to obtain the same hydrodynamics and kinetics behaviour in two reactors of different length and diameter scales; (2) develop a multiscale analysis regarding the communication of information between scales through the construction of a porous microstructure model from which the geometrical information of the microscale is captured by the effective transport coefficients (which affect the overall reactor behaviour); (3) investigate the effect of operation condition variations on hydrodynamics and kinetics; and (4) assess the deviations and further differences observed from average to punctual conversion values and the assumptions from kinetic literature models through a preliminary multiscale analysis. The CFD results were validated against experimental pressure drop data as well as HDS and HDN conversion theoretical data. An excellent agreement was found. The model produces a significant improvement in hydrodynamic parameter prediction, achieving 5 times better accuracy in predicting pressure drops and 50 % improvement in holdup prediction. The fully coupled model predicts HDS conversion with 96 % accuracy and HDN conversion with 94 % accuracy. Results suggest that the best way to obtain similar kinetic and hydrodynamic behaviour in TBRs with different lengths and diameter length scales is by equaling the liquid holdup( ϵ γ )or the mass velocities (L‐G).