A comparative study of sandwich cross-flow and random catalytic packings for multiphase chemical reactors

The aim of this work was to investigate the performance of a cross-flow sandwich catalytic structure and to compare it with that of conventional random packings. The liquid-phase catalytic hydrogenation of Styrene to Ethylbenzene in n-Butanol solution was chosen as the test reaction. The intrinsic kinetics of the reaction was preliminarly investigated in a batch multiphase rotating basket reactor. The tests with the various kinds of catalytic packing were carried out in a tubular reactor (50 mm internal diameter) by recycling both the liquid and the gas phase. The results of this work show that mass transfer and hydrodynamic limiting effects in cross-flow structured packing are significantly lower than in a random bed of particles both in upflow and downflow concurrent regimes.