流化床反应器的历史

流化床反应器

Fluidized Bed Reactor; FBR 流化床反应器;快堆

<美国华盛顿大学—文献资料> strategy555@

These pages were constructed to convey the importance of Fluidized Bed Reactors (FBRs) in today's petroleum and chemical process industries

Fluidized Bed Reactors (FBRs) are used to produce products ranging from jet fuel to fertilizers and from plastics to synthetic fibers. FBRs developed over time, and new applications for FBRs are still being developed today

The History and Early Impact of Fluidized Bed Reactors

The early history of FBRs is interwined with World War II and involved tremendous amounts of engineering skill and capital expense by over 400 oil and chemical processing companies

The History of FBRs

In the early 1900's, the Standard Oil Company, then the largest oil company in the world, was using temperature distillation and thermal cracking to refine crude oil into different products; such as, kerosene, fuel oils and lubricants. At the same time, Standard was researching alternative methods of "cracking" the lower value long-chain crude oil molecules into the high value smaller molecules of the fuel and lubricant products.

It wasn't until the mid-1920's that there was a significant breakthrough allowing the development of a better "cracking" unit. In Europe at this point, advances in catalyst technologies were being used to convert coal into oil.

In 1936, a process was developed called the Houdry Process. It used a fixed-bed catalyst to "crack" petroleum molecules. In this process the catalyst was prone to coking. This required that the coke deposits be burned off periodically. For the first Houdry cracking unit, the time required to burn off (regenerate) the coke was equal to the time the unit had been running. That is, for every ten minutes of cracking time, there was a ten-minute regeneration time. However, this was not the only problem with the Houdry Process. The Houdry Process had a license fee of $53M, roughly $600M in today's dollars. Needless to say, Exxon Research (a descendent of Standard Oil) thought they could do better than that.

Late 1930's prototype catalytic cracking unit

In 1938, Exxon Research joined a consortium of large oil and processing companies to further develop the catalytic "cracking" process. They eventually came up with the concept of a moving bed of catalyst.

The moving bed was termed "fluidized", as it moved and had properties analogous to a fluid. While regeneration still required shutting down the process, there were a number of benefits associated with the new process. When used for gasoline production this type of process delivered higher octane gasoline and increased production as compared to the previously mentioned Houdry units.

The first production facility using the fluidized bed concept for the catalytic cracking of petroleum feedstocks came online at 2:25am on May 25, 1942.