SIMULATION OF MICROACTIVITY TEST (MAT) REACTOR

Abstract

FCC is an important part of modern refinery. From an economic point of view, catalysts play a decisive role in the FCC unit. Activity and selectivity of catalyst is one of the important aspects for selecting a suitable catalyst. This is done at laboratory label by microactivity test (MAT) reactor. A vast amount of work has already been done to determine reaction kinetics of many catalysts using single event model based on lumping scheme. Gupta et al. (2007) was the first to use a multi-events kinetic model based on pseudocomponent approach for fluidized bed riser reactor. This work is an attempt to use this multievent model for the study of reaction kinetics in a fixed bed MAT reactor. Ideally, this multievent kinetics should be process and design independent; therefore, same kinetic equation as proposed by Gupta et al. (2007) is used in the present work. The experimental results of MAT reactor could satisfactorily simulated by only minor adjustment of four parameters of the original model. Even though there are large differences in the processes conditions of riser reactor selected by Gupta et al. (2007) and the MAT reactor of present work, [e.g., height (30 in for riser and 90 mm for MAT), radius (0.8 m for riser and 10 mm for MAT), pressure (2.9 atm for riser and 0.9 atm for MAT) or feed flow rate (20Kg/s for riser and 0.01g/s for MAT)] a very good agreement between the rate constants indicates that multievent model is less process and design independent and hence more reliable.