Effects of catalyst amount, membrane tube diameter and permeation rate on the performance of porous membrane reactors

Effects of catalyst amount, membrane tube diameter, and permeation rate on porous membrane reactor performance were investigated through experiments a nd simulations. Porous Vycor glass membrane reactors were used in the exper iment. To study the effect of catalyst amount, permeation side of a membran e reactor was filled with the same catalyst as that used in the feed side, i.e. 0.5 wt% Pt/Al2O3. The Omega, that is, a volume fraction of a catalyst in the permeation side was varied from 0% to 100%. It was observed that ove rall conversion increases with the Omega value. To study the effect of memb rane tube diameter on the performance of a modified porous membrane reactor (NPMR), experiment and simulation using different membrane tube diameters were conducted. The results show that there are optimum membrane tube diame ter to achieve maximum conversion. It also reveals that in an MPMR, membran e surface area and ratio of V-T/V-S are more important than membrane thickn ess. In order to study the effect of permeation rate, some simulations were conducted. The results show that permeation rate significantly affects the performance of porous membrane reactors. By designing appropriate paramete rs, it is possible to achieve high purity organic product in the permeation side of MPMR.