Sorption-enhanced methanol synthesis: Dynamic modeling and optimization

Abstract Owing to the global energy concerns in today's world, alternative fuels such as methanol have become an increasingly attractive option to meet the growing power demand. This work considers a dynamic mathematical model of a gas-flowing solids-fixed bed reactor (GFSFBR) with in situ water adsorption for methanol synthesis in the face of long term catalyst deactivation. Contact of gas and fine solid particles inside packed bed results in the selective adsorption of water from the methanol synthesis that leads to higher methanol production compared to the conventional methanol reactor (CMR). Moreover, a theoretical investigation has been performed in order to evaluate the optimal operating conditions and maximize the methanol production in a GFSFBR using differential evolution (DE) algorithm as a robust method. Dynamic optimization result has shown that under optimum values of inlet temperature of gas phase, inlet temperature of flowing solid phase, and inlet temperature of shell side the highest methanol production can be achieved during the operating period.