(620l) Simulation of a Typical and An Advanced Fischer Tropsch Reactor Technology

Simulation of a Typical and an Advanced Fischer Tropsch Reactor Technology

Marwan Abbas¹, Fadwa
T. El jack¹, Aswani Mogalicherla², Elfatih Elmalik²
and Nimir O. Elbashir²

(1)Department
of Chemical Engineering , Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

(2)Chemical
Engineer Department, Texas A&M, Doha, Qatar

10A – 00     Systems & Process Design

During the past twenty years, tremendous investments from the major
players in the energy market have been directed towards Gas to Liquid (GTL)
technology. The advantage of GTL technology in energy production is that it
furnishes a broad range of environmentally clean fuels, additives and
value-added. While the GTL market continues to grow, there are still many
hurdles to overcome in order to optimize the use of this important technology
– all of which are related to technology limitations. Our proposed
project is focused on the design of
advanced Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) reactor
technology to facilitate operating the reaction on both conventional media (gas
phase) and non-conventional media (supercritical phase). The latter assumed to
provide unique reaction medium to leverage certain advantages over the
current commercial technologies (slurry reactor and multi-tubular reactor) and
at the same time overcome their limitations¹

The main aim of this study is
to develop simulation models of Fischer Tropsch Synthesis (FTS) reactor
technology.  The approach to
design this novel reactor technology has been described in a previous study
[2]. The modeled
reactor configurations operating at gas phase , slurry
phase , near and super critical phase conditions (SCF) will be compared to existing
FTS commercial reactors (Fixed Bed Reactors , Shell Bintulu Plant in Malaysia)
and experimental reactors (Supercritical , Roberts and Elbashir [1]).
Simulating FTS reactors have always been a challenge. This due to their abnormal
chemistry behavior that led available design tools to not best represent the FT
and SCF-FT reactions. The main reactor design focus will be on SCF-FT. SCF-FT
has been strongly considered to yield better fuel products. The SCF media used
has the capability of improving the diffusivity (gas like) and heat transfer (liquid
like) [3]. Our study will be consisting of two phases. Phase one will mainly
focus on using the existing academia tools such as (ASPEN Plus ¨) to model
different FT reactors and then compare it to available commercial and
experimental results. This will help conclude the advantages and the disadvantages
of the existing solutions used to model the FT reactors. The second phase will
be focusing on creating our own FT and SCF-FT reactor model configuration and compare
it to the experimental results. This step will be achieved using other
available tools such as (ASPEN Simulation Workbook (ASW) and Computational
Fluid Dynamics model (CFD)). Our final results of the reactor design is to closely
follow the results of SCF-FT reactors previously reported .The study will also
examine the economic aspect of SCF-FT reactors to account for the additional
cost accompanied with the use of technology.

References

[1]. Elbashir N. O., Bukur D. B.,
Durham E., Roberts C. B. (2010) "Advancement in Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis via
Utilization of Supercritical Fluids as Reaction Media" AIChE J; 56 (4)
997-1015.

[2]. Elbashir, N. O., and Eljack, F.T. (2010) "Models for
Designing Advanced Fischer Tropsch Reactor
Technology" Proceedings of the 2^nd Annual Gas Processing Symposium;
Elsevier.

[3]  Bao B., El-Halwagi M. M.,
Elbashir, N. O. (2010) "Simulation, Integration, and Economic Analysis of
Gas-to-Liquid Processes" Fuel Proc. Techn.; in press.