ABSTRACT
Gas-to-liquid (GTL) technology is a chemical process that converts natural gas to ultraclean fuels and value-added chemicals through what is known as the Fischer–Tropsch synthesis (FTS). The data generated from these studies have been used to design a novel FTS reactor technology. A bench scale of this unit has been commissioned at Texas A&M Qatar building and proved to produce typical hydrocarbon products under different operating conditions. As was mentioned previously, the aim of this study was to develop an appropriate technique to simultaneously evaluate the mass and heat transfer inside the catalyst pellet and reactor bed itself. This, however, considerably complicates the task of finding a numerical solution. MATLAB is a powerful modeling tool that has the ability to solve a system of ODEs, either boundary-value problem (BVP) or initial-value problem (IVP). The temperature distribution was investigated along the length of the reactor for both supercritical fluid (SCF)-FTS and gas-phase FTS.
