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CFD analysis of bed textural characteristics on TBR behaviour: Kinetics, scaling‐up, multiscale analysis, and wall effects
Author(s) -
Uribe Sebastián,
Cordero Mario E.,
Zárate Luis G.,
Valencia López José Javier,
Natividad Reyna
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the canadian journal of chemical engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.404
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1939-019X
pISSN - 0008-4034
DOI - 10.1002/cjce.23298
Subject(s) - microscale chemistry , scaling , computational fluid dynamics , mechanics , kinetic energy , pressure drop , multiscale modeling , experimental data , thermodynamics , materials science , kinetics , chemistry , statistical physics , mathematics , physics , geometry , classical mechanics , statistics , mathematics education , computational chemistry
Abstract 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).