Reactor Pressure Control Module

The most accurate and stable pressure regulator for 16-reactors with just ±0.1bar RSD at reference conditions

How to prevent pressure drop influencing the feed distribution

In traditional high throughput systems, changes in pressure drop will have a direct impact on the feed distribution. If the reactor pressure in not actively controlled, differences in the inlet pressure will directly impact the feed distribution and the reactors will not receive the same feed flow. The resulting effects are even more pronounced at small scale testing. Such testing systems cannot compensate for this, which results in reduced testing precision.

Avantium invented the Reactor Pressure Control (RPC) to overcome this problem. The RPC ensures the pressure between all reactors is always equal. See related patented technology WO2014062055 and WO2014062056.

The benefit

If there is a pressure drift during a test, the RPC can actively compensate for this to ensure an equal inlet pressure for each reactor, ensuring the continued precise functioning of the microfluidic gas distribution. This advantage is even greater in the case of low-pressure processes such as Oxidative Methane coupling or Reforming, because in such cases even small variations in reactor pressure can have a large impact on the yields of products.

In addition, the RPC always records real-time pressure drop measurements over each reactor. This enables early detection of potential plugging in any reactor.

Avantium’s microfluidics in combination with the i-RPC guarantee the most precise feed distribution in the industry.

Reactor pressure control is not only important to ensure accurate pressure control, but also to help maintaining equal distribution of the inlet flow over the 16 reactors.

The Reactor Pressure Controller (RPC) uses microfluidics technology to individually regulate the backpressure of each reactor, enabling the most accurate and stable pressure control in a multi-parallel reactors system, with an average reactor to reactor pressure deviation ±0.1barg RSD.

By measuring the inlet pressure of each reactor, the RPC maintains a constant inlet pressure by regulating the backpressure. As a result, the distribution of the inlet flows over the 16 reactors is unaffected and a low reactor-to-reactor flow variability is achieved (see also the Active liquid distribution).