CFD Analysis of BED Textural Characteristics on TBR Behavior: Hydrodynamics and Scaling-up

Abstract

In recent years, CFD has played an important role in the understanding and design of TBR’s. In this work, through CFD with Eulerian approach, a three-phase heterogeneous reactor model was developed, were the accuracy of Interfacial Momentum Exchange Model (IMEM) for the gas-solid interaction, the effect of a more detailed catalytic bed geometry description, and the pellet shape over TBR hydrodynamics of two fluid phases interacting with the solid phase was studied. Then, a second model was developed, where the validated hy- drodynamic model was coupled with mass transport for an HDS process of light gasoil. Additionally, in order to insight into the scaling up process of a TBRs, the proposed columns behaviors were compared against lit- erature columns using four different ways, and it was found that the best predictions were obtained when the models’ holdup were equaled to those evaluated in literature columns. Since in reliable literature deviations in pressure drop predictions of around 30% can be found, the model results show significant improvement against literature, achieving 5 times better accuracy in predicting pressure drops, and 50% improvement in holdup prediction; the coupled model reproduces the same conversion values compared with literature data, and predicts conversions with 95% accuracy