Structural and Operational Optimality of Adsorptive Reactors

Adsorptive reactors represent a promising genre of multifunctional reactors combining the highly compatible adsorptive and reactive functionalities. Although they offer multiple benefits to the overall process flowsheet, overcoming the low space time yields, which are an inherent drawback of their cyclic operation, and unwanted functionality interference remain a challenge. The potential of temperature profiling to expedite the macrostructuring of adsorptive reactors for performance optimization is presented. Two industrially relevant reactions have been investigated as test cases: the Claus reaction for recovering sulfur from acid gas and the Deacon reaction for the plant-internal recycling of chlorine via HCl oxidation.