Heat exchanger/reactors (HEX reactors): Concepts, technologies: State-of-the-art

Process intensification is a chemical engineering field which has truly emerged in the past few years and is currently rapidly growing. It consists in looking for safer operating conditions, lower waste in terms of costs and energy and higher productivity; and away to reach such objectives is to develop multifunctional devices such as heat exchanger/reactors for instance. This review is focused on the latter and makes a point on heat exchanger/reactors. After a brief presentation of requirements due to transposition from batch to continuous apparatuses, heat exchangers/reactors at industrial or pilot scales and their applications are described

Toward a Competitive Process Intensification:A New Generation of Heat Exchanger-Reactors

Process Intensification (PI) in chemical production is a major concern of chemical manufacturers. Among the numerous options to intensify a process, the transposition from a batch reactor to a continuous plug flow reactor is a good alternative when the selectivity and the thermal exchange are an issue. In this context, the RAPIC R&D project aims to develop an innovative low-cost component (in the 10 kg/h range). This project deals with the design from the local to the global scale and with testing, from elementary mock-ups to pilot scale. The present paper gives a detailed description of this research project and presents the main results on specification and definition of the reaction channel and the first simple mock-ups

Nonlinear Observer Based Fault Diagnosis for an Innovative Intensified Heat-Exchanger/Reactor

International audienceThis paper describes an application of a fault detection and isolation (FDI)scheme for an intensified Heat-exchanger (HEX)/Reactor, where the exothermicchemical reaction of sodium thiosulfate oxidation by hydrogen peroxide is per-formed. To achieve this, precise estimation of all states of HEX/Reactor, includ-ing temperatures and concentrations of different reactants, as well as process faultdetection and isolation is completed by a high gain observer. Then, process faultidentification is achieved by several banks of interval filters. Finally, an intensifiedHEX/reactor is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. Simulationresults are shown to illustrate the performance of the algorithm presente