Particle Scale Transport Phenomena in Trickle Bed Reactors

Particle Scale Transport Phenomena in Trickle Bed Reactors
1st supervisor and 1st promotor: Prof. Hans Kuipers (TU/e)
2nd supervisor and co-promotor: Assistant Prof. Maike Baltussen (TU/e)
Affiliation: Eindhoven University of Technology
Research theme: Smart Biomass Conversion

Currently both trickle bed reactors and bubble slurry columns are used to perform Fischer-Tropsch processes. The advantages of processing three phase flows with a trickle bed reactor are the low degree of back mixing and the co-current operation of the reactor. However, the trickle bed reactor technology is relatively difficult to design and scale-up, because the operation is fully governed by the particle-scale phenomena.

In close collaboration with the project Flow MRI of trickle bed reactors, this project will focus on the modelling of these particle-scale phenomena using Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS). To obtain a model for three phase flows, a gas-liquid DNS method, Volume-of-Fluid, is coupled with a fluid-solid DNS method, Immersed Boundary method. The obtained method will be validated with well-defined (MRI) measurements. In addition, the three-phase method will be extended to include coupled heat and mass transfer.

Keywords:

• Trickle bed reactors
• Multiphase flow
• VOF-IB method
• Heat and mass transfer
• Direct numerical Simulations