Modeling and Simulation of Packed Bed Reactors
Tutorial
Packed bed reactors are widely used in chemical processes where solid catalysts interact with liquid or gaseous reactants. These catalysts, which commonly are spheres, cylinders or other geometric shapes, are tightly packed into a tube. As the reactant fluid flows through the tube, chemical reactions occur on the surfaces of the catalysts.
This tutorial explains how to model and simulate pack bed reactors in GeoDict, covering everything from standard catalyst shapes to complex, custom geometries. It opens the door to digital reactor design and optimization, enabling flexible digital experimentation where different catalyst layouts can be created, visualized, and quantitatively compared.
By analyzing pressure fields, flow lines, and concentration distributions, and by directly comparing standard with user-defined catalysts, the tutorial offers a solid basis for reactor performance analysis. Scientists and material developers can follow it to study geometric variations in detail and to virtually test innovative reactor designs.
In this tutorial you will learn step-by-step:
- Set up the tutorial project: Create the project and understand its storage structure.
- Build the reactor: Construct the reactor housing where catalysts will be placed
- Pile cylindrical catalysts: Use predefined geometries (e.g., cylinders) to fill the reactor
- Simulate water flow with cylindrical catalysts: Calculate the pressure drop under flow conditions.
- Visualize the results: Display pressure fields, flow lines, and concentration distributions.
- Create custom GAD objects: Design individual catalyst geometries beyond the standard shapes.
- Pile custom GAD objects: Place the created geometries into the reactor
- Simulate water flow with custom catalysts: Calculate the pressure drop for the user-defined designs.
- Compare results: Directly compare simulations with standard catalysts and custom objects.
The settings for the generation of reactor and catalysts, as well as for the flow simulation, have been inspired by the settings presented in Dorai et al. (2015).
Not registered yet? Register for free and enjoy all the benefits.
