A. Trianto et T. Kokugan, Effects of catalyst amount, membrane tube diameter and permeation rate on the performance of porous membrane reactors, J CHEM EN J, 34(11), 2001, pp. 1332-1340
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.