Comparative evaluation of critical operating conditions for a tubular catalytic reactor using thermal sensitivity and loss-of-stability criteria
✍ Scribed by Gheorghe Maria; Dragoş-Nicolae Ştefan
- Book ID
- 111491370
- Publisher
- Versita
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 846 KB
- Volume
- 64
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0366-6352
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Abstract
Optimal operation of a chemical reactor according to various performance criteria often drives the system towards critical boundaries. Thus, precise evaluation of runaway limits in the parametric space becomes a crucial problem not only for the reactor’s safe operation, but also for over-designing the system. However, obtaining an accurate estimate for operating limits is a difficult task due to the limited validity of kinetic models describing complex processes, as well as the inherent fluctuations of the system’s properties (catalyst, raw-material quality). This paper presents a comparison of several effective methods of deriving critical conditions for the case of a tubular fixed-bed catalytic reactor used for aniline production in the vapour phase. Even though the methods being compared are related to one another, the generalised sensitivity criterion of Morbidelli-Varma (MV) seems to be more robust, not depending on a particular parameter being perturbed, when compared to the criteria that detect an incipient loss of system stability in the critical region (i.e., div-methods based on the system’s Jacobian and Green’s function matrix analysis). Combined application of div- and MV criteria allows for an accurate evaluation of the distance from the reactor’s nominal conditions to the safety limits.