Optimal design of a radial-flow membrane reactor as a novel configuration for continuous catalytic regenerative naphtha reforming process considering a detailed kinetic model

The significance of the catalytic naphtha reforming process in the petroleum refining and petrochemical industry generates continuous evolution of the technology. These improvements would be observed in presenting more efficient reactor setups in order to improve production yield and operating conditions, as well as elucidating better kinetic and deactivation models with higher predicting ability. Both of these items have been considered in this work. An optimized radial-flow moving bed membrane reactor has been proposed as a novel configuration for naphtha reforming process. Optimization has been carried out by differential evolution (DE) method considering 40 decision variables. A detailed kinetic model has also been presented. The proposed kinetic model consists of 32 lumped pseudo-components and 84 reactions. Deactivation rate of catalyst has also been taken into account by considering coke deposition on both acidic and metallic sites. Plant data have been used to validate the modeling results. In order to assess the performance of the proposed configuration, the obtained modeling results have been compared with those of conventional configuration, which shows the superiority of the presented one.