Dead zone for hydrogenation of propylene reaction carried out on commercial catalyst pellets

Heterogeneous catalytic processes have for years been of crucial importance in the chemical industry, while biocatalitic processes have become more and more important. For both types of the processes the existence of zones without reactants were reported. Despite the fact that the dead zone can appear in real processes relatively often, the most important problem in practice is the real size of a dead zone inside a catalyst pellet or the real depth of penetration reagents in a biofilm and this is still unsolved. The knowledge of the parameters and some information about the process can allow improvement in yield, and selectivity, reduce consumption of catalyst by reducing the bed size etc. Presented in this work is a simple method of predicting the size of the inactive core of a uniformly activated catalyst pellet. The method is based on a simple mathematical model of catalyst pellet with inactive pellet centre and experimental investigations.