Dynamic Modelling for a Trickle-Bed Reactor Using the Numerical Inverse Laplace Transform Technique

Experimental evaluation and dynamic modelling were presented for the transient behavior of a trickle bed reactor in which gas and liquid streams flow downwards through a bed of catalyst particles. One-dimensional dynamic mathematical model has been described to study the gas-liquid-solid process in which the gas phase (Ar) with the tracer (SO2) is treated as a continuum. The physical model has been analyzed, including the formulation of initial and boundary conditions and the description of the solution methodology. An experimental procedure to measure the concentrations of the tracer (SO2) has been performed. The concentration measurements for this tracer (SO2) were performed in a fixed be reactor on trickling flow of the gas phase for a range of operating conditions. The gas-liquid mass transfer (kgl) coefficient, liquid-solid mass transfer (kls) coefficient, gas holdup (hg) and partial wetting efficiency (fe) were chosen as the hydrodynamic parameters of the proposed mathematical model. Such parameters have been optimized with the experimental measurents of the tracer (SO2) at the exit of the trickle-bed reactor. The optimized parameters hg, kgl, kls and fe were calculated simultaneously using the equation (51) with minimization of the objective function. Results of the mathematical model was presented and compared to the two experimental cases. Each above parameters were correlated using empirical correlations.