Hydrogenation of acetylene: Kinetic studies and reactor modeling

Navid Mostoufi, University of Tehran
Ali Ghoorchian, University of Tehran
Rahmat Sotudeh-Gharebagh, University of Tehran

Abstract

The kinetics of acetylene hydrogenation has been studied in a fixed bed reactor of a commercial Pd/Al2O3 catalyst. The experiments were carried out at 30, 50 and 70 ºC with various feed compositions at atmospheric pressure. The experiments were repeated at 70 ºC in the presence of the used catalyst to determine the effect of the catalyst deactivation where the corresponding deactivation rate constant was determined in order to predict the activity of the catalyst during each run. Two well known kinetic models were used for a nearly similar catalyst to predict the experimental data of this work and none of them were found satisfactory. A new model was then proposed to fit the experimental data. The hydrogenation reactor was also simulated at industrial operating conditions with the proposed kinetics for both plug and dispersion flows. The results of these simulations were almost close to each other in most cases.