Andrei V. Kolesnikov, Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, Tshwane UNiversity of Technology, 175 Nelson Mandela Drive, Bld 3 Office 423, Pretoria, South Africa
Moving bed reactors (MBR) are commonly used in chemical processing industry. The aim of this work is to lay down the thermal efficiency of the moving bed reactor with internal heat recuperation by the way of numerical simulation of hydrodynamics and heat transfer in a two-phase flow with heterogeneous chemical reaction and complex heat transfer (conduction, convection and radiation). CFD model based on Eulerian-Eulerian approach was used. Transient simulations were also done to estimate consequences of possible loss of cooling. The results of calculations revealed the thermal efficiency of MBR with internal heat recovery as function of design parameters (reactor inner diameters and lengths of various parts) and operation conditions (temperatures and flow rates of raw material stream, cooling stream and heating agent streams) under operations constraints (temperature of outlet stream).