Combining heterogeneously catalysed chemical reaction with thermal separation in one unit appears to be an effective way to intensify industrial processes, where applicable. Further significant improvements in this direction are expected from a new generation of structured packing based modular contactors which allow certain flexibility with respect to the variation in the reaction to separation requirements in a single unit. However, little is known about hydraulic and mass transfer performance characteristics of such complex contactor-separator configurations. Total reflux experiments have been performed at atmospheric pressure using pilot plant facility available at TU Delft with Sulzer KatapakSP 12 packing, in conjunction with two test systems, an aqueous system and an organic mixture. The tests were performed first with a bed comprising the structured packing MellapakPlus 752.Y, then with a bed comprising only KatapakSP 12, and finally with a bed simulating actual case with three elements of KatapakSP 12 placed in between short beds of MellapakPlus 752.Y on upper and lower side. As expected the pressure drop and mass transfer performance of hybrid bed were in between those of two homogeneous beds. Taking a predictive model developed originally for common corrugated sheet structured packings, which was later extended to so-called high capacity packings, as a building block, a new, parallel channel model was developed that makes a distinction between catalyst filled pockets in the reaction section and the open and/or closed channels in separation section. With this simple approach it appeared possible to account properly for specific geometric features of modular catalytic structured packing, without using any empirical, packing type specific constant. The new model proved to be capable to predict the mass transfer efficiency around the loading (design) point.

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