Mitigating heat transfer limitation in packed bed reactors through using a novel internal

Abstract

Aided by particle-resolved CFD simulations, this study proposes a novel metal internal to enhance heat transfer in packed bed reactors, with dry reforming of methane as a model reaction. Under the same bed diameter (i.e., 31.4 mm), the bed with the internal can reduce pressure drop by 39 %, raise cold-spot temperature by 63 K, increase methane conversion by 11 %, and reduce catalyst amount by 27 %, compared to the conventional bed without the internal. Besides, the bed with the internal can adopt a larger bed diameter (61.4 mm for copper internal) to achieve comparable reactor performance with the conventional one (31.4 mm), yielding a 74 % reduction in tube number for a multi-tubular reactor. These improvements can be attributed to the presence of orderly catalyst particle packing and heat transfer “highway” after introducing this internal. This proposed metal internal is simple yet effective and thus shows great potential for industrial applications.