What is catalytic reactor? What are it's various types. Describe in detal.

Catalytic Reactors

Catalytic reactions and reactors have widespread applications in the production of chemicals in
bulk, petroleum and petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, specialty chemicals etc.
The simultaneous developments in catalysis and reaction engineering in 1930s and 1940s acted
as a driving force for the onset of rational design of catalytic reactors.
These rigorous design efforts, firmly based on sound mathematical principles, in turn triggered
the development of several profitable catalytic processes.
In the late 1930s, it was established that for very rapid reactions, increase in the size of porous
catalyst particle size resulted in decrease in the activity of a catalyst per unit volume due to
insufficient intra particle diffusion.

Simplified homogeneous models were mainly used in the beginning to measure the
performance of catalytic reactors. Rigorous mathematical models developed in the 1950s and
the 1960s showed that importance of intra- and inter-particle diffusion for a variety of complex
situations. At the same time, non-isothermal studies of catalyst particle and reactors were also
investigated. With the advent of computers, solution of complex mathematical models became
relatively easy. With more powerful numerical analysis and faster computers, sophisticated
heterogeneous reactor models were proposed and solved. One well-known example of
application of such a model in an industrial process is KINPtR , developed by Mobil for its
reformer operations.

Parallel to the development of rigorous mathematical analysis of reactors, research in catalysis

grew rapidly with an aim for identifying and preparing highly active, selective, and stable
catalysts. With advancements in new instrumentation and analytical techniques, it is now
possible to study catalysis at the atomic level, determine the structure and composition of the
catalyst and precisely carry out quantitative estimation of the interaction of reactant and
product at the surface of the catalyst. This information is highly useful in determining the effect
of surface chemistry on the overall performance of the catalyst.

Catalytic reactors have appeared periodically in the literature. Currently work on preparation of
an encyclopedic account of different reactors and a user-friendly interactive database is in
progress at the National Chemical Laboratory, India. This work is one such effort to briefly
review the development of catalytic reactors right from the days of early development to its
current status. This topic we will discusses the fixed bed reactor, its types, importance of fluid
dynamics, and catalyst on the reactor performance. And then summarize the modeling aspects
of fluidized bed catalytic reactors and bio catalytic reactors respectively. The highlights of the
developments in unconventional reactors.
Why study reactors?
1. The design of catalyst and reactor are closely interrelated.
2. Design of catalytic processes requires a knowledge reactor design, operation optimization and
selection.
3. Progress in improving our standard of living depends on our ability to design reactors
4. Our personal existence depends on controlling cellular reactions in our body while that of the
human race hangs on the outcome of enormous global reactions.
What is a reactor

A device that encloses the reaction space, and which houses the catalyst and reacting media .
A container to which reactants are fed and products removed, that provides for the control of
reaction conditions .
Reactors are used for many different purposes:
1. To study the mechanisms and kinetics of chemical reactions to provide data
for validation of process simulations.
2. To investigate process performance over a range of process variables.
3. To obtain design data
4. To produce energy, materials and products.

Types of Reactors
There are following different types of reactors:

1. Continuous stirred tank reactor.

2. Fixed bed reactor.
3. Tabular reactor.
4. Moving bed reactor.
5. Fluidized bed reactor.
There description is as follows:

Continuous stirred tank reactors

The continuousflow stirred-tank reactor (CSTR), also known as vat- or backmixreactor, is a

common ideal reactor type in chemical engineering. A CSTR often refers to a model used to
estimate the key unit operation variables when using a continuousagitated-tank reactor to reach a
specified output.
 The behavior of a CSTR is often approximated or modeled by that of a Continuous Ideally
Stirred-Tank Reactor (CISTR). All calculations performed with CISTRs assume perfect mixing.
In a perfectly mixed reactor, the output composition is identical to composition of the material
inside the reactor, which is a function of residence time and rate of reaction.

If the residence time is 5-10 times the mixing time, this approximation is valid for
engineering purposes. The CISTR model is often used to simplify engineering calculations and
can be used to describe research reactors. In practice it can only be approached, in particular in
industrial size reactors.

In a continuous-flow stirred-tank reactor (CSTR), reactants and products are continuously

added and withdrawn. In practice, mechanical or hydraulic agitation is required to achieve
uniform composition and temperature, a choice strongly influenced by process considerations.
The CSTR is the idealized opposite of the well-stirred batch and tubular plug-flow reactors.
Analysis of selected combinations of these reactor types can be useful in quantitatively
evaluating more complex gas-, liquid-, and solid-flow behaviors.
(Continuous stirred tank reactors, (a) With agitator and internal heat transfer surface, (b)
With pump around mixing and external heat transfer surface).

Because the compositions of mixtures leaving a CSTR are those within the reactor, the
reaction driving forces, usually the reactant concentrations, are necessarily low. Therefore,
except for reaction orders zero- and negative, a CSTR requires the largest volume of the reactor
types to obtain desired conversions. However, the low driving force makes possible better
control of rapid exothermic and endothermic reactions.

When high conversions of reactants are needed, several CSTRs in series can be used.
Equally good results can be obtained by dividing a single vessel into compartments while
minimizing back-mixing and short-circuiting. The larger the number of CSTR stages, the closer
the performance approaches that of a tubular plug-flow reactor.

Continuous-flow stirred-tank reactors in series are simpler and easier to design for isothermal
operation than are tubular reactors. Reactions with narrow operating temperature ranges or those
requiring close control of reactant concentrations for optimum selectivity benefit from series
arrangements.

If severe heat-transfer requirements are imposed, heating or cooling zones can be

incorporated within or external to the CSTR. For example, impellers or centrally mounted draft
tubes circulate liquid upward, then downward through vertical heat-exchanger tubes. In a similar
fashion, reactor contents can be recycled through external heat exchangers.

Applications:
 i. In industry, a packed column is a type of packed bed used to perform separation processes,
such as absorption, stripping, and distillation.
ii. A packed column is a pressure vessel that has a packed section. Columns used in certain
types of chromatography consisting of a tube filled with packing material can also be
called packed columns and their structure has similarities to packed beds. The column can be
filled with random dumped packing (creating a random packed column) or with structured
packing sections, which are arranged or stacked (creating a stacked packed column).
iii. In the column, liquids tend to wet the surface of the packing and the vapors pass across this
wetted surface, where mass transfer takes place. Packing material can be used instead of trays
to improve separation in distillation columns.
iv. Packing offers the advantage of a lower pressure drop across the column (when compared
to plates or trays), which is beneficial while operating under vacuum.
v. Differently shaped packing materials have different surface areas and void space between
the packing. Both of these factors affect packing performance.

Packed Bed Reactors

Packed bed reactors can be used in chemical reaction. These reactors are tubular and are
filled with solid catalyst particles, most often used to catalyze gas reactions. The chemical
reaction takes place on the surface of the catalyst. The advantage of using a packed bed reactor is
the higher conversion per weight of catalyst than other catalytic reactors. The conversion is
based on the amount of the solid catalyst rather than the volume of the reactor.

Tubular reactor or plug flow reactors

A tubular reactor is a vessel through which flow is continuous, usually at steady state,
and configured so that conversion of the chemicals and other dependent variables are functions
of position within the reactor rather than of time. In the ideal tubular reactor, the fluids flow as if
they were solid plugs or pistons, and reaction time is the same for all flowing material at any
given tube cross section. Tubular reactors resemble batch reactors in providing initially high
driving forces, which diminish as the reactions progress down the tubes.

Flow in tubular reactors can be laminar, as with viscous fluids in small-diameter tubes,
and greatly deviate from ideal plug-flow behavior, or turbulent, as with gases. Turbulent flow
generally is preferred to laminar flow, because mixing and heat transfer are improved. For slow
reactions and especially in small laboratory and pilot-plant reactors, establishing turbulent flow
can result in inconveniently long reactors or may require unacceptably high feed rates.

Tubular reactors are always used in a continuous flow mode with reagents flowing in and
products being removed. They can be the simplest of all reactor designs. Tubular reactors are
often referred to by a variety of names:

 Pipe reactors
 Packed-bed reactors
 Trickle-bed reactors
 Bubble-column reactors
Ebulating-bed reactors

Single-phase flow in a tubular reactor can be upward or downward. Two-phase flow can be
co-current up-flow, counter-current (liquid down, gas up) or, most commonly, co-current down-
flow.
 Tubular reactors can have a single wall and be heated with an external furnace or they can be
jacketed for heating or cooling with a circulating heat transfer fluid. External furnaces can be
rigid, split-tube heaters or be flexible mantle heaters.

Applications
Tubular reactors are used in a variety of industries:

 Petroleum, Petrochemical, Polymer. Pharmaceutical, Waste Treatment, Specialty

Chemical, Alternative Energy
Tubular reactors are used in a variety of applications:

 Carbonylation, Dehydrogenation, Hydrogenation, Hydrocracking, Hydroformulation,

Oxidative decomposition, Partial oxidation, Polymerization,Reforming
It is often desirable to size a tubular reactor to be large enough to fit 8 to 10 catalyst particles
across the diameter and be at least 40-50 particle diameters long. The length to diameter ratio can
be varied to study the effect of catalyst loading by equipping the reactor with “spools” to change
this ratio.

Moving Bed Reactor

In manufacturing, the simulated moving bed (SMB) process is a highly engineered

process for implementing chromatographic separation. It is used to separate one chemical
compound or one class of chemical compounds from one or more other chemical compounds to
provide significant quantities of the purified or enriched material at a lower cost than could be
obtained using simple (batch) chromatography.

It cannot provide any separation or purification that cannot be done by a simple column
purification. The process is rather complicated. The single advantage which it brings to a
chromatographic purification is that it allows the production of large quantities of highly purified
material at a dramatically reduced cost. The cost reductions come about as a result of: the use of
a smaller amount of chromatographic separation media stationary phase, a continuous and high
rate of production, and decreased solvent and energy requirements. This improved economic
performance is brought about by a valve-and-column arrangement that is used to lengthen the
stationary phase indefinitely and allow very high solute loadings to the process.

In the conventional moving bed technique of production chromatography the feed entry and the
analyte recovery are simultaneous and continuous, but because of practical difficulties with a
continuously moving bed, simulated moving bed technique was proposed. In the simulated
moving bed technique instead of moving the bed, the feed inlet, the solvent or eluent inlet and
the desired product exit and undesired product exit positions are moved continuously, giving the
impression of a moving bed, with continuous flow of solid particles and continuous flow of
liquid in the opposite direction of the solid particles.
 True moving bed chromatography (TMBC) is only a theoretical concept. Its
simulation, SMBC is achieved by the use of a multiplicity of columns in series and a complex
valve arrangement, which provides for flow of the feed mixture and solvent, and "eluent" or
"desorbent" feed at any column. The valving and piping arrangements and the predetermined
control of these allow switching at regular intervals the sample entry in one direction, the solvent
entry in the same direction but at a different location in the continuous loop, whilst changing
the fast product and slow product takeoff positions to also move in the same direction, but at
different relative locations within the loop.

Advantages:

SMB provides lower production cost by requiring less column volume, less
chromatographic separation media ("packing" or "stationary phase"), using less solvent and less
energy, and requiring far less labor.

At industrial scale an SMB chromatographic separator is operated continuously, requiring

less resin and less solvent than batch chromatography. The continuous operation facilitates
operation control and integration into production plants. Low eluent consumption High product
concentration High productivity Continuous process This system is useful in the supercritical
fluid extraction to obtain large quantity of specific product.

Applications
In size exclusion chromatography, where the separation process is driven by entropy, it is
not possible to increase the resolution attained by a column via temperature or solvent gradients.
Consequently, these separations often require SMB, to create usable retention time differences
between the molecules or particles being resolved.

SMB is also very useful in the pharmaceutical industry, where resolution of molecules having
different chirality must be done on a very large scale. For the purification of fructose, e.g. in high
fructose corn syrup, or amino-acids, biological-acids, etc. on an industrial scale simulated
moving bed chromatography is used.
 Fluidized Bed Reactor
A fluidized bed reactor (FBR) is a type of reactor device that can be used to carry out a variety
of multiphase chemical reactions. In this type of reactor, a fluid (gas or liquid) is passed through
a solid granular material (usually a catalyst possibly shaped as tiny spheres) at high
enough velocities to suspend the solid and cause it to behave as though it were a fluid. This
process, known as fluidization, imparts many important advantages to the FBR. As a result, the
fluidized bed reactor is now used in many industrial applications.
Basic Principles
The solid substrate (the catalytic material upon which chemical species react) material in
the fluidized bed reactor is typically supported by a porous plate, known as a distributor. [1] The
fluid is then forced through the distributor up through the solid material. At lower fluid
velocities, the solids remain in place as the fluid passes through the voids in the material. This is
known as a packed bed reactor.

As the fluid velocity is increased, the reactor will reach a stage where the force of the fluid on the
solids is enough to balance the weight of the solid material. This stage is known as incipient
fluidization and occurs at this minimum fluidization velocity. Once this minimum velocity is
surpassed, the contents of the reactor bed begin to expand and swirl around much like an agitated
tank or boiling pot of water. The reactor is now a fluidized bed. Depending on the operating
conditions and properties of solid phase various flow regimes can be observed in this reactor.
Advantages:
The increase in fluidized bed reactor use in today's industrial world is largely due to the
inherent advantages of the technology.

Uniform Particle Mixing: Due to the intrinsic fluid-like behavior of the solid material,
fluidized beds do not experience poor mixing as in packed beds. This complete mixing allows for
a uniform product that can often be hard to achieve in other reactor designs. The elimination of
radial and axial concentration gradients also allows for better fluid-solid contact, which is
essential for reaction efficiency and quality.
 Uniform Temperature Gradients: Many chemical reactions require the addition or
removal of heat. Local hot or cold spots within the reaction bed, often a problem in packed beds,
are avoided in a fluidized situation such as an FBR. In other reactor types, these local
temperature differences, especially hotspots, can result in product degradation. Thus FBRs are
well suited to exothermic reactions. Researchers have also learned that the bed-to-surface heat
transfer coefficients for FBRs are high.

Ability to Operate Reactor in Continuous State: The fluidized bed nature of these reactors allows
for the ability to continuously withdraw product and introduce new reactants into the reaction
vessel. Operating at a continuous process state allows manufacturers to produce their various
products more efficiently due to the removal of startup conditions in batch processes.
Disadvantages

As in any design, the fluidized bed reactor does have it draw-backs, which any reactor
designer must take into consideration.

Increased Reactor Vessel Size: Because of the expansion of the bed materials in the
reactor, a larger vessel is often required than that for a packed bed reactor. This larger vessel
means that more must be spent on initial capital costs.

Pumping Requirements and Pressure Drop: The requirement for the fluid to suspend the
solid material necessitates that a higher fluid velocity is attained in the reactor. In order to
achieve this, more pumping power and thus higher energy costs are needed. In addition,
the pressure drop associated with deep beds also requires additional pumping power.

Particle Entrainment: The high gas velocities present in this style of reactor often result in fine
particles becoming entrained in the fluid. These captured particles are then carried out of the
reactor with the fluid, where they must be separated. This can be a very difficult and expensive
problem to address depending on the design and function of the reactor. This may often continue
to be a problem even with other entrainment reducing technologies.
Lack of Current Understanding: Current understanding of the actual behavior of the
materials in a fluidized bed is rather limited. It is very difficult to predict and calculate the
complex mass and heat flows within the bed. Due to this lack of understanding, a pilot plant for
new processes is required. Even with pilot plants, the scale-up can be very difficult and may not
reflect what was experienced in the pilot trial.

Erosion of Internal Components: The fluid-like behavior of the fine solid particles within
the bed eventually results in the wear of the reactor vessel. This can require expensive
maintenance and upkeep for the reaction vessel and pipes.

Pressure Loss Scenarios: If fluidization pressure is suddenly lost, the surface area of the bed may
be suddenly reduced. This can either be an inconvenience (e.g. making bed restart difficult), or
may have more serious implications, such as runaway reactions (e.g. for exothermic reactions in
which heat transfer is suddenly restricted).