Scale-up of a rotating packed bed reactor with mesh-pin rotor: (II) mass transfer and application

A systematic scale-up study of the rotating packed bed (RPB) reactor is essential before the industrial application. However, the mass transfer and application performance of the RPB reactor with scale-up mesh-pin rotor (MPR) were still unclear. In this work, the mass transfer, including effective interfacial area (ae) and liquid-side volume mass transfer coefficient (kLae), of RPB reactor with scale-up MPR were investigated. An amendatory kLae model for the scale-up MPR was established based on the hydrodynamic studies. The calculation results from the amended model were validated by experimental data under deviations of ±20%. Taking H2S removal as an application case, the removal efficiency by using scale-up MPR was not lower than 96.98%. No obvious scale-up effect was observed in RPB reactor with two different-sized MPRs, which can be regarded as a scale-up strategy for this kind RPB reactor.