Experimental Study and Modeling of an Adiabatic Fixed-bed Reactor for Methanol Dehydration to Dimethyl Ether

One-dimensional heterogeneous plug flow model was employed to model an adiabatic fixed-bed reactor for the catalytic dehydration of methanol to dimethyl ether. Longitudinal temperature and conversion profiles predicted by this model were compared to those experimentally measured in a bench scale reactor. The reactor was packed with 1.5 mm γ-Al2O3 pellets as dehydration catalyst and operated in a temperature range of 543-603 K at an atmospheric pressure. Also, the effects of weight hourly space velocity (WHSV) and temperature on methanol conversion were investigated. According to the results, the maximum conversion is obtained at 603.15 K with WHSV of 72.87 h−1.