The rotating bed reactor (RBR) is a combined tool for chemical transformations and liquid transfer operations, reducing or eliminating the need for external pumps. Filled with a catalyst or adsorbent, and rotated by a motor, the RBR brings the liquid to be processed in contact with the solid-phase at high flow rates. Due to the high flow rate generated, the RBR can not only treat the liquid in the reaction vessel, but also transfer it into the vessel for processing.
In the processing of large volumes of liquids, pumps are typically used to transfer the liquid between containers, process vessels and treatment systems. The use of pumps is associated with a number of problems, such as:
Installations of an RBR in this setup are known as plug-in deployments, and make up the most modular installations of an RBR at large scale. With the plug-in RBR, your reactor operations are agile and you can easily adapt to future changes to your needs. Even a low-footprint system can yield a very high throughput, which further reduces your overhead costs.
Even the smallest rotating bed reactor (RBR S2) creates such a strong flow that no transfer pump is needed to remove a contaminant from the liquid in an external vessel.
Details
Conditions: A water filled (2 L) connected system consisting of a tank (1 L) to which an external flower baffled vessel (200 mL) was connected via pipes (24.6 mm ID). A SpinChem® rotating bed reactor (RBR) S221 filled with activated carbon (28 mL, 20-50 mesh) was placed in the external vessel and rotated at 1000 rpm adsorbing dissolved methylene blue (40 mg) within 14 minutes.