A PROBABILISTIC MODEL OF THE FISCHER-TROPSCH SYNTHESIS IN A FLOW REACTOR

The Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is usually carried out in flow reactors, such as fluidized-bed and bubble column slurry reactors. The nature of multiphase flow together with the well-known random nature of chemical reactions renders the performances of such flow reactors stochastic. In this work, stochastic processes, more specifically continuous time Markov chains, are employed for analyzing and modeling both the dispersive mixing and chemical kinetics in a flow reactor for the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. The model predicts the distributions of products inside as well as outside the reactor at any time Under a steady state operation, the model gives rise to the Flory equation. Other results include expressions for predicting the mole fraction of chains with j carbon atoms inside and outside the reactor. This approach can be applied to both time homogeneous and heterogeneous processes.