Catalytic wet air oxidation of phenol using active carbon: performance of discontinuous and continuous reactors

Catalytic wet air oxidation (CWAO) of an aqueous phenol solution using active carbon (AC) as catalytic material was compared for a slurry and trickle bed reactor. Semi‐batchwise experiments were carried out in a slurry reactor in the absence of external and internal mass transfer. Trickle‐bed runs were conducted under the same conditions of temperature and pressure. Experimental results from the slurry reactor study showed that the phenol removal rate significantly increased with temperature and phenol concentration, whereas partial oxygen pressure had little effect. Thus, at conditions of 160 °C and 0.71 MPa of oxygen partial pressure, almost complete phenol elimination was achieved within 2 h for an initial phenol concentration of 2.5 g dm^?3. Under the same conditions of temperature and pressure, the slurry reactor performed at much higher initial rates with respect to phenol removal than the trickle bed reactor, both for a fresh active carbon and an aged active carbon, previously used for 50 h in the trickle bed reactor, but mineralisation was found to be much lower in the slurry reactor. Mass transfer limitations, ineffective catalyst wetting or preferential flow in the trickle bed alone cannot explain the drastic difference in the phenol removal rate. It is likely that the slurry system also greatly favours the formation of condensation polymers followed by their irreversible adsorption onto the AC surface, thereby progressively preventing the phenol molecules to be oxidised. Thus, the application of this type of reactor in CWAO has to be seriously questioned when aiming at complete mineralisation of phenol. Furthermore, any kinetic study of phenol oxidation conducted in a batch slurry reactor may not be useful for the design and scale‐up of a continuous trickle bed reactor. © 2001 Society of Chemical Industry