An Approach to the Design of Advanced Fischer-Tropsch Reactor for Operation in Near-Critical and Supercritical Phase Media

Abstract Since the discovery of Fisher-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) eighty-five years ago, only three major designs for the reactor bed found their way to commercial scale plants (tubular fixed-bed reactors, fluidized fixed-bed reactors and slurry reactors). The challenges to optimize the existing commercial reactors or to consider alternative designs for FTS processes still exist and they are attributed to the complex nature of the synthesis process as well as the difficulty to control the thermophysical characteristics of the reaction mixture. In this paper, we describe the design of an advanced reactor system for FTS utilizing the unique properties of the supercritical solvent (a hydrocarbon mixture of C 5 -C 7 ). Supercritical fluid solvents combine the desirable properties of gas-like diffusion along with liquid-like heat transfer and solubility to overcome several limitations of the current industrial reactors. In addition, this work describes a new strategy to optimize the design of an advanced FTS catalytic reactor for near-critical and supercritical operation.

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