Affiliation: | a Department of Chemical Engineering and CERPIC, Université Laval, Ste-Foy, Que., Canada G1K 7P4 b Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Industrial Chemistry, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Polizu 1, 78126 Bucharest, Romania c Department of Food Sciences and Nutrition, Université Laval, Ste-Foy, Que., Canada G1K 7P4 |
Abstract: | A comparative analysis is made for a trickle-bed reactor, a packed-bubble column, a three-phase fluidized bed and a slurry-bubble column with an active and moderately deactivating catalyst for the wet oxidation at high pressure and temperature of organic-containing aqueous wastes. Compared to other mature industrial sectors where multiphase reactors are prevalent, the design of three-phase catalytic reactors for wet air oxidation processes is still at an emerging stage. This paper discusses, from a multiphase reactor engineering perspective, the design of such contactors by setting an exhaustive modeling framework of catalytic wet oxidation in which the molecular, particle and reactor scales are integrated. The simulation results indicate that when wet oxidation is liquid-reactant limited, packed-bubble columns outperform trickle beds, whereas slurry-bubble columns are the most vulnerable to “coke” deactivation. |