To meet the new challenges of the chemical indutries, the developpement of new heterogeneous catalytic reactors and their understanding are mandatory. From these perspectives, new reactor designs based on structuring at micro or millimeter scales have emerged. They have sparked interest for their ability to decrease physical limitations for heat and mass transfers. Thus, two advanced reactor technologies for gas-liquid-solid catalysed reactions are studied. The first reactor is a micro-structured falling film (FFMR) in which vertical sub millimetric grooves are etched and coated with a catalyst. This structuration allows stabilizing the gas-liquid interface of a down flow liquid phase. A thin liquid film is generated leading to high specific surface areas. Commercially available, it represents a very good potential for performing demanding reactions (i.e.fast, exothermic) for small scale productions such as pharmaceuticals. In a second part, a new reactor concept is proposed. Open cell foams are used as catalyst support and inserted in a milli-square channel. The reactor is then submitted to a preformed gas-liquid Taylor flow. In both cases, hydrodynamics features are studied by using microscopy based methods. Their potential in terms of mass transfers are also studied by performing catalyzed α-methylstyren hydrogenation. For both reactors, it comes out that the particular flow induced by micro or milli structures leads to at least one order of magnitude higher mass transfers performances than mutliphase reactors currently used in the industry albeit it remains to be demonstrated at such scale. From all these studies, correlations, models and methods for chemical engineers (hydrodynamics, pressure drops, mass transfer) are proposed for the two reactors
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-01015051 |
| Date | 26 February 2014 |
| Creators | Tourvieille, Jean-Noël |
| Publisher | Université Claude Bernard - Lyon I |
| Source Sets | CCSD theses-EN-ligne, France |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PhD thesis |
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