Many catalytic refining and petrochemical processes involve two-phase reactive systems in which the continuous phase is a fluid and the porous phase consists of rigid particles randomly stacked. Improving both the design and the operating conditions of these processes represents a major scientific and industrial challenge in a context of sustainable development. Thus, it is above all important to better understand all the intricate couplings at stake in these flows: hydrodynamic, chemical and thermal contributions. The objective of our work is to build up a multi-scale modelling approach of reactive particulate flows and at first to focus on the development of a microscopic-scale including heat and mass transfers and chemical reactions for the prediction of reactive flows through a dense or dilute fixed bed of catalyst particles.
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