Investigation of the Hydrodynamics of Fixed Bed Reactor: Co-current Upflow

The main objective ofthis project is to investigate the hydrodynamic characteristics of
co-current upflow of gas and liquid in a fixed bed reactor. This is an experimental
based project utilizing the packed bed reactor for residence time distribution (RTD)
studies. In this project, the RTD of a bench-scale multiphase was studied using air as
a gaseous phase and water as a liquid phase. The ranges of air and water velocities are
kept at such levels as to simulate the hydrogen/oil ratios of typical bench-scale
hydroprocessing units. The experiments are conductedin upflowmode of operationin
the reactor, with increasing gas/liquid ratio. The effects of gas and liquid velocities on
different hydrodynamic parameters such as pressure drop and operating liquid holdup
are investigated. Three moments analysis, which are mean residence time, variance,
and skewness, are evaluated in order to characterize the RTD. Other parameters such
as bed Peclet number of liquid and stagnant zone volume were also investigated with
variation of gas and liquid velocities as to measure the efficiency of the reactor. The
discrepancies in experimental results suggested that there are conditions to be altered
in order to eliminate the inconsistency.