Jizhong Chen

Abstract:

A fixed-bed membrane reactor was proposed to improve in-situ removal of water during methanol synthesis for enhancing the productivity of methanol. A quasi-dimensional reactor model based on the conservation of mass, energy and momentum with the non-ideal gas model was developed to simulate the synthesis process of methanol numerically. The effects of the membrane permeability, flow rate of reactants, inlet mole ratios, sweeping gas rate, reaction temperature and pressure on the productivity of methanol and profiles of different compositions were investigated. The simulation results show that the productivity of methanol in the fixed-bed membrane reactor might increase 11.38 % compared with the traditional fixed-bed reactor. The productivity of methanol would increase 15.21 % when sweeping gas rate in the sweep side increases from 0.1m/s to 0.3 m/s. A hot spot could be found close to the inlet of the reactor because of the strong exothermic characters of the reactions. These preliminary simulation results show that the fixed-bed membrane reactor technology with in-situ water removal is more efficient for methanol synthesis than a conventional fixed-bed reactor.