Column Tube Methanol Synthesis Reactor And The Catalysts Used In The Synthesis Optimization

Catalyst engineering design, which has been developed based on catalysis chemistry and chemical reaction engineering, is an active frontier research field and it takes the industrial application of catalysts as its objective. With the synthetic use of knowledge of chemical reaction engineering, catalysis chemistry, computer application and applied mathematics, the influence factors on performance of catalyst pellets and their regularity should first be analyzed and studied. And then, it is necessary to design rationally the shape, size and pore structure of industrial catalyst pellets and make them match the reactor, so as to realize the global optimization of catalytic operation unit. Because of the complexity and variance involved in catalyst engineering design, however, most research efforts were focused on either catalyst pellet or reactor separately. At present, only few of integrated research literatures can be found in this area. Therefore, in this dissertation, the global optimization of methanol synthesis system over domestic C302 Cu-based catalyst was studied on both catalyst pellets and reactor.At first, the methodology of engineering design for uniformly activated catalysts was systematically discussed and researched based on the achieved results as reported in recent years. A guidable frame was proposed to indicate the research direction.Up to now, intraparticle diffusion-reaction process models for ideal reaction system have been studied widely and intensively. However, there is obviously a logical contradictory when using these models to a non-ideal system, such as methanol synthesis system. Therefore, on the viewpoint of force balance and flux, a general model of diffusion-reaction process taking place in single catalyst pellet for non-ideal reaction systems was developed, which could be simplified to conventional diffusion-reaction models if necessary. As a foundation, It is convenient to develop general software simulating the diffusion-reaction processes in a catalyst pellet using this model. Taking ammonia and methanol synthesis as examples and using simulation method, this model is analyzed and compared with traditional ones. These results show that the presented model is effective and significant.