Investigation of low-temperature methanol synthesis in a bubble column slurry reactor with a flash column

A scale-up strategy for low-temperature methanol synthesis in a circulating slurry bubble reactor

“…The critical gas velocity for complete catalyst suspension in the slurry of mixture of xylene and MeONa solution was approximately 0.2 cm/s in CSBC1 (Zhao et al, 2005a), which is lower than the critical gas velocity for quartz sand in tap water.…”

“…For N 2 -actual liquid medium-CuCr catalyst powder system, reasonable superficial gas velocity ranged from 0.2 to 8.0 cm/s (Zhao et al, 2005a).…”

“…After being depressurized, the non-condensable gas from the top of the product receiver was metered by an on-line wet-test meter. The majority of the non-condensable was vented whilst the other was collected into a gas holder for gas analysis (Zhao et al, 2005a). The compositions of feed gas, tail gas and liquid product were analyzed by gas chromatography as depicted in Section 3.…”

“…Furthermore, OP-10 was added in the circulating bubble column reactor, but it was absent in the autoclave. Zhao et al (2005b) reported that OP-10 influences the reaction behaviour of LTSM. This influence needs to be further investigated in future work.…”

“…An alternative method via methyl formate (MeF) at lowtemperature of around 373 K in a liquid phase has been proposed by Christiansen in 1919, and has achieved great success in recent years (Sapienza et al, 1986;Liu et al, 1989Liu et al, , 1998Marchionna et al, 1997Marchionna et al, , 1998Zhao et al, 1998Zhao et al, , 1999Zhao et al, , 2001Zhao et al, , 2005aLee and Aika, 1999;Li and Jiang, 1999;Linghu et al, 1999;Ohyama, 1999;Tsubaki et al, 2001;Zheng et al, 2002;Zhang et al, 2003a). This process consists of two-steps -MeOH carbonylation to MeF followed by hydrogenolysis of MeF to two MeOH molecules as shown below: CH 3 OH + CO = HCOOCH 3 , HCOOCH 3 + 2H 2 = 2CH 3 OH, Net 2H 2 + CO = CH 3 OH.…”