Multiphase reactor analysis for Fischer-Tropsch reaction

Gas-inducing stirred tank reactors (GISTs) are very attractive for industrial chemical processes where efficient mixing holds the key to superior product yield and quality particularly in situations where the reaction has a low conversion per pass as is the case for the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis. However, the benefits can only be properly harnessed if there is a reliable set of quantitative relations between operating variables and the mixing attributes as well as reaction metrics. Thus, this book provides a pioneering investigation of electrical process tomography-aided GIST operation based on the FT reaction in order to correlate reaction metrics with mixing characteristics. The technique is non-invasive, using electrical signals corresponding to changes in the component distribution within the vessel with the aid of reconstruction algorithms. In addition, CFD also was used to elucidate the hydrodynamic behaviour within the system. In the FT reaction, the steady-state gas phase hold-up dependency on temperature was shown to be due to contributions from both thermal expansion and reaction-induced changes in the liquid phase.