OP-II-3

OP-I-28DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS OF THE MRI TOOLKIT INCHEMICAL ENGINEERING AND HETEROGENEOUS CATALYSISKoptyug I.V. 1 , Lysova A.A. 1,2 , Kovtunov K.V. 1 , Zhivonitko V.V. 1 , Skovpin I.V. 1 ,Khomichev A.V. 1 and Sagdeev R.Z. 11 International Tomography Center SB RAS, Novosibirsk 630090, Russia,E-mail: koptyug@tomo.nsc.ru2 Boreskov Institute of Catalysis SB RAS, Novosibirsk, 630090, RussiaIn an ongoing study, we employ magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tocharacterize in situ the heterogeneous hydrogenation of unsaturated compounds inan operating gas-liquid-solid trickle bed reactor with continuous or modulatedreactant feed [1,2]. These studies allow one to map the distribution of the liquidphase within the catalyst bed, to visualize directly various dynamic processes, and toevaluate local reactant-to-product conversion. Many model studies of trickle bed andother multiphase reactors reported in the literature use “dummy” reactors, i.e., glassbead packs, water and air instead of the actual catalyst beds and liquid and gaseousreactants. In this respect, these MRI studies use a more realistic reactor modelbased on an actual catalytic process. The importance of this is addressed in acomparative study in which n-octene-1 is supplied to the bed of Pd/γ-Al 2 O 3 catalyst,while the gas phase is either H 2 or N 2 . The results clearly demonstrate that thedistributions of the liquid phase within the catalyst bed are very different underreactive and non-reactive conditions. In particular, the exothermal hydrogenation ofoctene into octane leads to a pronounced non-uniformity of the liquid phasedistribution in the catalyst bed. These qualitative observations are further supportedby the semi-quantitative evaluation of the external liquid holdup and the internalwetting efficiency of the catalyst particles from the MRI data. Both quantities areobserved to be measurably reduced under reactive conditions.The distribution of the liquid phase in the catalyst bed is largely affected by theheat transport processes associated with the exothermal hydrogenation reaction. TheMRI toolkit can be employed to obtain spatial temperature distributions as well. It isthus feasible to study mass and heat transport processes in an operating reactorusing a single technique, i.e., under identical conditions and even at the same time.To achieve this, we continue to develop multinuclear and solid-state MRI approachesfor the spatially resolved thermometry of operating catalytic reactors. The viability ofthe approach based on the direct imaging of 27 Al nuclei of the Pd/Al 2 O 3 catalyst bedwas demonstrated in the course of hydrogenation of propylene into propane [3]. One-90