Analysis and optimization of cross-flow reactors with distributed reactant feed and product removal

A systematic and general model was proposed for the simulation of cross-flow reactors with product removal and reactant feed policies. Six types of cross-flow reactors were analyzed for reversible series-parallel reaction systems and their optimal feed distributions were determined by maximizing the desired product yield at the outlet of the reactor. The performances of reactors with different types of feed policies were compared at their optimal operating conditions. For irreversible reaction systems with lower order in distributed reactant for the desired reaction than those for undesired reactions, a higher yield and selectivity of the desired product could be achieved with the reactors with staged feed than with conventional co-feed reactors and a sufficiently high residence time was required by staged feed reactors to significantly improve the desired product yields and selectivities over those obtained by a co-feed reactor. However, for reversible reaction systems, the desired product yield always reached a maximum value, and then dropped down as the residence time increased. In addition to the kinetic order and residence time requirements, the rate constants of the reactions involved have to fall within certain ranges for the distributed feed reactor to obtain a higher maximum yield than one-stage co-feed reactors. Optimally distributed feed reactors always give higher maximum product yields than evenly distributed reactors with the same number of feed points. However, the improvement of yields is not as great as that between co-feed reactors and evenly distributed reactors. On the other hand, for reaction systems with higher order with respect to the distributed reactant in the desired reaction than the undesired reactions, co-feed reactors always give higher yield than staged feed reactors.