Process Intensification of Reactive Systems with Microfibrous Materials

Catalytic reactors are the cornerstone of chemical processes because their feed requirements and performance dictate the size and configuration of the remaining unit operations and balance of plant in a given process. One of the greatest challenges when attempting to intensify a process is overcoming the heat and mass transport limitations that are present in traditional reactors. Engineers often employ complex reactor designs, structures, and processing methodologies to overcome the deleterious performance that ultimately results from these limitations. These approaches either a) are only economical at very large scales due to the large number of ancillary systems necessary to support the complexity, or b) are not implemented due to limitations in reliability, manufacturability, or cost. Overcoming these hurdles in a simple, cost-effective manner is essential to achieve process intensification.

IntraMicron’s Microfibrous Entrapped Catalyst (MFEC) technology is ideally suited to assist with process intensification because of its ability to simultaneously minimize heat and mass transport limitations within a simple fixed bed reactor structure. The backbone of MFEC technology is a conductive, porous sintered microfibrous media (MFM) that entraps or immobilizes premanufactured catalyst. For a given system, the size and volumetric loading of this premanufactured catalyst is selected so that it will operate with a nearly 100% effectiveness factor at nearly isothermal conditions. For many reactive systems MFEC technology can be implemented to provide a 250-fold improvement in effective radial thermal conductivity and a 10-fold improvement in mass transfer compared to traditional packed bed reactor systems. Simultaneously providing a fundamental enhancement in heat and mass transport in reactive systems greatly facilitates key process intensification methodologies including integrating functions, phenomena, and unit operations. For example, this approach allows efficient thermal management when multiple exothermic catalytic functionalities to be combined in a single reactor tube particularly when it is beneficial to break equilibrium limitations that would be present when these reactions are conducted sequentially. This enables process developers to consider operating reactive systems in regimes that are not possible with current reactor technology. MFEC also greatly facilitates process scaleup for catalytic systems because the catalyst particles, when entrapped in the MFM, do not need to be engineered into large extrudates as the process is scaled. Several current activities surrounding the application of microfibrous materials to achieve process intensification will be discussed as well as their impact on process design.