Numerical investigation of the ethylbenzene dehydrogenation reaction in a fixed bed reactor with catalyst granules of various sizes

In this work, we get a numerical simulation analyzes the effect of catalyst granule size on the operation efficiency of the fixed bed reactor for the dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene. For the laboratory reactor, we built a detailed model of cylindrical catalyst granules with a length of 3 mm, 6 mm and 9 mm. We carried out an analysis of the granule size effect on the bed characteristics, such as porosity and the catalyst total surface area. We obtained results for a wide range of feed gas rates. The ranges and rates of the catalyst efficiency decrease for different feed gas rates are determined.