PERFORMANCE OF ONE-DIMENSIONAL APPROXIMATIONS TO PREDICT EFFECTIVENESS

NÉSTOR J. MARIANI; MARÍA J. TAULAMET; S.D. KEEGAN; OSVALDO M. MARTÍNEZ; GUILLERMO F. BARRETO

Houston

Simposio; 3rd North American Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering (NASCRE-3); 2013

International Symposia on Chemical Reaction Engineering

The analysis of one-dimensional (1D) approximations to deal with reaction and diffusion phenomena inside catalytic pellets of arbitrary shape is undertaken in this contribution. Two 1D models are tested: a single parameter (1D-GC model) and, a slightly more complex alternative that presents three parameters 1D-DV model). Procedures to evaluate model´s parameters relay on criteria of matching the behavior of the actual pellet at high and/or low Thiele moduli. In order to test the models performance, a typical set of commercial catalytic pellets under a variety of abnormal kinetic expression are selected. It is shown that near the limit of steady state multiplicity the 1D-VD model is able to predict effectiveness factor with maximum errors of around 10% for the whole range of Thiele modulus while the 1D-GC models show errors of up to 40%.