Transferência de calor em reator cilíndrico elíptico de leito fixo: aspectos termofluidodinâmicos e geométricos.

Abstract

In this work, various analytic and numeric three-dimensional mathematical models were developed and presented to study heat transfer inside a fixed bed reactor, using a equilibrium or convective boundary condition, constant or variable thermal conductivity of the reactor and system with or without chemical reaction. The mathematical modeling presented has been the flexibility of adapting to beds with geometric shape varying from a rectangular channel to the elliptic cylinder, including the cylinder circular. The numeric methodology used to solve the differential equations that represent the physical phenomenon is based in the finite volume method. For discretize the general conservation energy equation the WUDS (Weighted Upstream Differentiates Scheme) scheme was used as interpolation function for convective and diffusive terms and a totally implicit formulation. The linear algebraic equations system resultant of the discretization of the energy equation in all points of the computational domain is iteratively solved by Gauss-Seidel method. Results of the temperature distribution inside the reactor in function of the radial and angular positions, in different positions along the equipment are shown and analyzed. Several process conditions were studied, varying the heat transfer convective coefficient, the reactor geometric aspect ration, the reagent concentration, the temperature and superficial velocity of the fluid in entrance of the system. As an application of this work, the mathematical models developed were used to adjust the temperature experimental data collected in a thermal measures cell (fixed bed reactor) of cylindrical traverse section, seeking estimate thermal conductivity and heat transfer coefficient of the particles bed under several experimental conditions, using the minimum quadratic error technique.