CFD study of diesel oil hydrotreating process in the non-isothermal trickle bed reactor.

In the present study, the Eulerian-Eulerian multiphase approach was implemented to simulate the hydrotreating processes (hydrodesulfurization (HDS) and hydrodearomatization (HDA)) in the trickle bed reactor (TBR) by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. A new gas-liquid interphase heat transfer coefficient was used in the CFD model to predict the reactor performance at non-isothermal conditions. The effects of feed inlet temperature, gas and liquid velocities, operational pressure and hydrogen sulfide concentration of the gas phase were investigated to calculate the reactions conversions and the bed temperature distribution. Also, the influence of bed porosity and adiabatic operational conditions on the reactor temperature and HDS reaction conversion was discussed. The results showed at adiabatic reactor, HDS reaction conversion increased about 9% compared to constant wall temperature condition. Furthermore, it was found that neglecting the gas-liquid interphase heat transfer effect in the CFD model increases the average relative error between numerical and the experimental data at prediction of HDS conversion about 5% and also affects the bed temperature pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]