Objective
Trickle bed reactors are used in many chemical operations with rather high heat generation rates. Their drawbacks are the chance for runaways and thereby unsafety, moreover the selectivity to the desired product is less than wanted. During the last decade in different chemical engineering laboratories the insight has grown that cyclic operation will improve on the aspects of bad selectivity and unsafety. Cyclic operations can be performed in one of two ways:
- in the slow mode, where with a time interval of the order of minutes periodic changes of liquid feed rate and/or reactant concentration are forced, or;
- in the fast mode where short pulses of liquid, in the order of seconds, travel through the column.
The combination of non-steady state reactants behaviour and non-steady state hydrodynamics, mass and heat transfer makes a good design very complicated. Scientists of five principal laboratories, together with industries did gather within a thematic network and now have set up a project to combine good basic research to obtain a complete set of sesign and operation rules that will make this new technology available for implementation. The project will have a high radiative impact on many other processes in the chemical industry where forced cyclic operation can be used to achieve higher conversions, selectivity, safety and less waste.
It has been shown in the project that unsteady state operation has better conversion than conventional operation of trickle beds. In several experimental cases conducted in this project it was observed that higher conversion can be obtained while operating under cycling liquid flow conditions. Also it has been found that the mechanism for improvement of trickle bed reactors is mainly found in improved gas-liquid mass transfer. Although safety of the reactors is also influenced by cyclic operation, it could not be shown that pockets of liquids occurring in steady state were better refreshed under cyclic operation. A methodology for selection of cyclic operation of trickle beds as the reactor of choice was developed based on a heuristic methodology and it has been implemented in a commercially used software tool. The project also derived correlations, a reactor model and design methodology to size reactors and to find operating conditions which results are incorporated in the tools used by the reactor design departments of several industrial and company partners. To this end quite some experimental work has been conducted on lab and pilot scale at universities and at the facilities of industrial partners and sub-contractors. An important result from the project is the experimental data obtained and which, through publications in scientific literature, can be used by other groups for modelling or design purposes. The systems investigated are the catalytic hydrogenations of a-methyl styrene and of dicyclopentadiene.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences computer and information sciences software
- engineering and technology chemical engineering
- natural sciences computer and information sciences artificial intelligence heuristic programming
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
6160 MD GELEEN
Netherlands
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.