(495e) Surrogate Reactions for the Design of Pilot Scale Reactors in the Absence of Fundamental Reaction Parameters

Tubular packed-bed laboratory reactors are very good for measuring kinetic information of gas and gas/liquid reaction systems.  For purely liquid phase reagents, however, laboratory reactors often have aspect ratios entirely too low to ensure kinetically limited results.  While reactions important to the generation of conventional clean burning fuels generally fit into the gas and gas/liquid systems, the increased interest in the conversion and upgrading of thermally unstable and difficult to volatize biomass makes liquid phase laboratory data more common.  The scale up of this information requires some measure of kinetic and mass transfer parameters muddled by relatively low superficial feed velocity of laboratory reactors.  This paper outlines the use of surrogate reactions that occur at faster rates than the target reaction to estimate scale up parameters for liquid phase systems.  The isomerization of 1-hexene is provided as an example for the design of a solid acid catalyzed process in the liquid phase at the pilot scale.  Data from the reactor system designed using this surrogate method show this method of estimation to be a reasonable means of ensuring pilot scale data in the absence of unintended reactivity limits.