Relevance of synergetic approaches in intensifying catalytic reactors

Title : Relevance of synergetic approaches in intensifying catalytic reactors

Abstract:

Intensifying chemical reactors by development of an efficient synergy between the reactor and catalyst is leading to non-negligible saving in capital and operating costs of chemical plants while meeting requirements over conversion, selectivity and energy consumption. Recent achievements in developments in the topic of multifunctional catalytic reactors by combination of the chemical reaction with momentum, heat and mass transports in a single chemical unit are presented through a number of examples, including among others, hybrid catalytic reaction and separation, local catalyst deactivation in real flow system and  multiphase flow in engineered packing type of internals. In the first example, the etherification of tert-amyl alcohol with ethanol was carried out in a catalytic reactive distillation column inserted by a pervaporative zeolite NaA membrane tube. The design has shown alleviation of azeotropes of H₂O-reaction components mixtures and a gain of 10% in tert-amyl ethyl ether yield. In the second example, local deactivation of the preferential oxidation of CO was investigated in real flow reactor by three-dimensional modelling of flow and experimental tomography where the profiles of deactivation were found sensitive to the rates of deactivation, heat transfer by dispersion and intra-particle mass transfer at both reactor and packing pore scales. For instance, elevated deactivation was seen close to the wall due to a preferential flow circulation and progressed at the exteriors of the catalytic particles, particularly over the regions in contact with the convective flow. This presentation brings attention to relevance of accessing to real-time data of concentration, temperature and flow velocity, as well as relevance of the space scales by in-situ sensing. It also emphasizes the multidisciplinary approach when dealing with the simultaneous design of catalyst and catalytic reactor.

Keywords: catalytic process intensification, multifunctional reactor, multiscale design, in-situ sensing, engineered catalytic packing

Audience take-away:

• Process intensification is innovative strategy to deisgn reactive processes while looking at multiple aspects associated with reducing heat conception, by-products, unit size and catalyst load while promoting sustainable practices. The audience will appreciate relevance of innovative techniques to access to data while reactors are in operation along with prediction by modelling and design of conditions, which are not affordable to reproduce experimentally.
• Since the theme of the conference is about CCET, the audience will appreciate in the daily laboratory operations the fact that designing a catalyst and reactor is regarded as multidisciplinary subject where sub-subjects should be investigated simultaneously. A number of worked examples will be presented which could be taken further depending on their research interests. These examples are not final solutions but would contribute to solutions that can simply design of multifunctional catalytic reactors. The design by process intensification is intended to promote conversion, selectivity under less raw material and energy uses    

Biography:

Dr Farid Aiouache is Senior lecturer at Lancaster University since November 2012 after working as Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast (2006-2012) and Project engineer for a year in the oil and gas industry (CUB Engineering, Calgary, Canada, (2005–2006). He was full time Postdoctoral Fellow at Ecotopia Science Institute, Nagoya University, Japan (2003–2005) and a part-time Research Associate at the National Industrial Science and Research Institute, Japan, (2003–2005). During his postdoctoral work, he was involved in a pioneering work on spatially resolved NIR/IR imaging for heterogeneous reactions. He gained his PhD in Chemical Engineering (Nagoya University, 2000-2003) for a work on reaction and transport rate effects on pervaporative reactive distillation efficacy. Prior to his PhD project, he was Research Visitor at Nagoya University, chemical reaction engineering laboratory, 1999-2000, and was involved in a research area on multifunctional reactors (membrane reactors and reactive distillation). He holds a research background in oil and gas industry, reaction engineering applied to multifunctional reactors and process intensification for green chemical design. Currently, He is carrying out research projects in 3D modelling of catalytic processes, spatially resolved spectroscopic tools for 3D observations of fluid flow, mass and heat trends in chemical processes using lasers and tomography techniques applied to reactors, adsorbers, fuel cells, batteries, etc). Other subjects under developments are sustainable separation processing using green solvents, rational use of CO2 (separation, conversion and storage), bio-wastes conversion to liquid and gaseous fuels, bio-catalytic recovery of valuable metals from e-wastes, catalytic stripping  for nuclear waste waters processing, reactive waste ashes  for biodigestates processing into fertilizers. He has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers.