Moving Bed Reactors: Challenges and Progress of Experimental and Theoretical Studies in a Century of Research

Abstract

Moving bed reactors (MBRs) have been proposed as a sign of significant progress in the reaction engineering area for performance improving and energy saving. Since their advent in 1890, the MBRs have attracted a wide acceptance in different industries, while they were first developed for the drying industries. The progress that this technology has made during its evolution led to the introduction of these reactors as a pioneer strategy in other industries including petroleum, petrochemical, pyrolysis, and biomass industries. In the traditional reaction systems, the process performance decreases during the operational conditions, while MBRs have obviated this drawback by having an all-around permanent acceptable efficiency. In this context, the present work provides an overview on the evolution of MBRs by investigating the main experimental and theoretical studies. In this way, the experimental studies have typically taken into account operational conditions and production rates of different products, while in the theoretical research, modeling, and simulation of conventional processes, the evaluation of novel configurations and the optimization techniques have been investigated. In the end, some suggestions are proposed to modify the traditional MBRs as helpful ideas for further studies.

A comprehensive approach for designing different configurations of isothermal reactors with fast catalyst deactivation

“…From an industrial point of view, the original design of reactors with catalyst circulation can be an attractive tool for analyzing the feasibility of processes already commercialized or in development state [62]. Some of them have already been proposed to be carried out in MBR for dealing with catalyst deactivation, for instance the catalytic reforming of naphtha [63], the isobutane dehydrogenation [64] or the steam reforming of methane [65].…”

Compost from Municipal Solid Wastes as a Source of Biochar for CO2 Capture

“…The coal-and natural gas-fired power plants released 11.1 Gt of CO 2 , nearly 30 % of the total global emissions in 2012 [2,3]. In this way, the combustion of coal, also oil and natural gas industries including naphtha refineries [4,5] and petrochemical complexes [6,7], are the main industrial sources of CO 2 emissions [8,9]. As consequence of these industrial activities, the CO 2 percentage exceeded 50 ppm in the atmosphere from the maximum allowable level in the pre-industrial period until now (280-400 ppm) [10,11].…”

CO2 Capture From Air in a Radial Flow Contactor: Batch or Continuous Operation?

“…Moving bed contactors are well suitable for processes with a rapid, but reversible decay in activity of the solid material. In chemical reaction technology, this situation is encountered when dealing with rapid catalyst deactivation (Ginestra and Jackson, 1985;Pilcher and Bridgwater, 1990;Shirzad et al, 2019). In adsorption technology, like here for DAC, a similar rapid decrease in activity occurs due to saturation of the sorbent.…”