Modeling and simulation of an industrial three phase trickle bed reactor responsible for the hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene: A case study

•Modeling of an industrial trickle bed reactor responsible for the hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene into n-butane.•Developing a more detailed reaction network.•Investigation of the effect of inlet temperature on the behavior of the reactor.•Studying the performance of the reactor under different operating conditions of the flowing feed stream.

In this research, an industrial trickle bed reactor responsible for the hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene into n-butane has been chosen as a case study. In this regards, a suitable reaction network has been applied as the base kinetic structure and then it has been developed further to a more detailed reaction scheme capable of predicting available plant data. As the next step, attempts have been made to establish an accurate and simple to use mathematical modeling with the ultimate goal of predicting the plant outputs. The results ascertained the success of the proposed modeling in terms of total relative error of about 0.1. Moreover, the behavior of different parameters including temperature and molar flow rates along the length of the reactor has been studied. Additionally, the effect of inlet temperature on the behavior of the understudied trickle bed reactor has been seriously investigated. Finally, the performance of the three phase catalytic reactor has been studied under different operating conditions of the flowing feed stream.