Residence time distribution of the liquid in gas-liquid cocurrent upflow fixed-bed reactors

The authors present an experimental investigation of the residence time distribution (RTD) of the liquid in a gas-liquid upflow fixed-bed reactor with porous and nonporous particles and air/Newtonian or non-Newtonian systems. The piston-dispersion-exchange model with Danckwerts boundary conditions was used to describe the liquid flow. In the case of porous particles, the dynamic evolution of the tracer concentration in the particles was described in terms of diffusion phenomena. An imperfect pulse method was used to estimate the model parameters directly from the experimentally nonideal input and output response. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd