CFD Study of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in a Fixed Bed of Cylinders

Abstract

A comparative study was made of the wall segment and full-bed models of a fixed-bed reactor with cylindrical packing where the wall segment is a 120° segment of the full bed. The flow and heat transfer fields were simulated under industrial steam reformer inlet conditions by the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Good agreement between the two models was found for radial velocity and temperature profiles in the center of the wall segment. The imposition of symmetry walls in the segment caused discrepancies in their vicinity, and in overall averaged quantities such as pressure drop.

The authors thank Johnson Matthey, Process Catalysts and Technologies, for their financial support. Fluent, Inc., is acknowledged for the university license of their CFD software.