EXPERIMENTAL-DESIGN WITH STEADY-STATE AND DYNAMIC-MODELS OF MULTIPHASE REACTORS

The verification of multiphase reactor model parameters is a complicated practical problem because of the diversity of phenomena involved in the reaction process. Due to this complexity, designing experiments for selecting and estimating the essential parameters affecting the mechanisms of simultaneous mass transfer and reaction is challenging. To our knowledge, there are not much published information on experimental design with these very models. This paper presents some of our recent studies in which experimental design methods were applied for analyzing mass transfer and reaction in stirred gas-liquid and gas-liquid-solid reactors. The first case deals with a moderately fast gas-liquid reaction in a continuous-flow reactor. Transport characteristics were described by a steady-state one-response model based on material balances in the bulk of the liquid and the interfacial film. The effective experimental design proved to be beneficial since only five sequentially designed experiments in addition to ten screening experiments were required. Experimental strategy with dynamic model of a three-phase catalytic slurry system is illustrated secondly. The system was studied in three stages: gas-to-liquid absorption, liquid-to-solid adsorption and the surface reaction.