Determination of catalytic packing characteristics for reactive distillation

Catalytic distillation still expands its field of applications. New structured catalytic column internals have been developed in recent years and new studies have been reported. A modern structured catalytic packing MULTIPAK^® is a subject of the investigations presented in this paper.

Important parameters of MULTIPAK^® have been examined experimentally in a 250 mm ID laboratory column: pressure drop for dry, prewetted and irrigated packings, flooding line and mass transfer coefficients for the gas and liquid phases.

The correlations obtained have been incorporated into a software tool for the simulation of catalytic distillation processes and simulations have been performed assuming methyl acetate synthesis as a model process. The calculations have been verified using the experiments performed for the same synthesis in a 50 mm ID catalytic distillation column operating continuously and thus reflecting industrial applications. It is concluded that the model represents the real process with satisfactory accuracy, although some deviations can be observed, especially within the reactive zone.