One-dimensional isothermal multicomponent diffusion-reaction model and its application to methanol synthesis over commercial Cu-based catalyst

The present work was a study on global reaction rate of methanol synthesis. We measured experimentally the global reaction rate in the internal recycle gradientless reactor over catalyst SC309. The diffusion-reaction model of methanol synthesis was suggested. For model we chose the hydrogenation of CO and CO as key reaction. CO and CO were key components in our model. The internal diffusion effectiveness factors of CO and CO in the catalyst were calculated by the numerical integration. A comparison with the experiment showed that all the absolute values of the relative error were less than 10%. The simulation results showed that decreasing reaction temperature and catalyst diameter were conducive to reduce the influence of the internal diffusion on the methanol synthesis.