Modeling of fixed bed reactor for coal tar hydrogenation via the kinetic lumping approach

Hydrogenation technology is an indispensable chemical upgrading process for converting the heavy feedstock into favorable lighter products. In this work, a new kinetic model containing four hydrocarbon lumps (feedstock, diesel, gasoline, cracking gas) was developed to describe the coal tar hydrogenation process, the Levenberg–Marquardt’s optimization algorithm was used to determine the kinetic parameters by minimizing the sum of square errors between experimental and calculated data, the predictions from model validation showed a good agreement with experimental values. Subsequently, an adiabatic reactor model based on proposed lumped kinetic model was constructed to further investigate the performance of hydrogenation fixed-bed units, the mass balance and energy balance within the phases in the reactor were taken into accounts in the form of ordinary differential equation. An application of the reactor model was performed for simulating the actual bench-scale plant of coal tar hydrogenation, the simulated results on the products yields and temperatures distribution along with the reactor are shown to be good consistent with the experimental data.