(438b) Compact Heat Exchange Reactors for Process Improvement
AIChE Annual Meeting
2013
2013 AIChE Annual Meeting
Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division
Novel Reactors
Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - 8:50am to 9:10am
Compact Heat Exchange Reactors for Process Improvement
Steven Vallee, Zhijun Jia
Chart Energy & Chemicals, Inc., 2502 Losey Blvd, La Crosse, WI 54601
Abstract
Compact Heat Exchange Reactors (CHER) have been used in various applications to improve process productivity, efficiency, and safety. CHER combines a compact heat exchanger with a chemical reactor in a single device. The structure consists of multiple alternating layers for reaction and cooling in intimate proximity, with each layer containing multiple mini-channels in the millimeters scale. This type of structure has excellent heat transfer capability and a large surface area to volume ratio that remains constant upon scale-up.
CHER are especially well-suited for many applications with highly exothermic or endothermic reactions, Process Intensification (PI), or mass transfer enhancement (extraction, absorption). This presentation will include a description of CHER and its features, and give multiple examples of the use of CHER to obtain process improvements including fixed-bed Fischer-Tropsch applications.