Trickle bed reactors (TBRs) are widely used in petroleum industries, which are subjected to stringent environmental laws. Hydrodenitrogenation (HDN), a crucial process for nitrogen removal employed in crude oil processing, is typically carried out in steady state TBRs. Acquainted with this operation, researchers are focused on exploring the efficacy of flow modulation in TBRs for improved reaction conversion. A CFD model of a hydrotreating reactor is used in this work to examine potential benefits of periodic operation for a HDN reaction. Results of continuous flow were compared with time averaged conversions for slow and fast modes of on-off and min–max operations having different split ratios. All flow modulated cases proved to be beneficial than steady state operation with respect to enhanced time averaged conversion. However, this enhancement deteriorated with increase in cycle time for slow mode of operation. Additionally, this was associated with substantial undulations in overall pressure drop, which is detrimental to process safety. Nonetheless, fast mode of on–off and min–max operations at low split ratio resulted in maximum improvement of about 47% and 35%, respectively, which revealed the efficacy of fast mode flow modulation in achieving maximum conversion with lower pressure drop undulations.

ckle流床反应器（TBR）广泛用于受严格环境法律约束的石油工业。加氢脱氮（HDN）是原油加工中用于脱氮的关键工艺，通常在稳态TBR中进行。熟悉此操作后，研究人员专注于探索TBR中流量调节的功效，以改善反应转化率。在这项工作中，使用了加氢处理反应器的CFD模型来检查HDN反应的定期运行的潜在好处。将连续流量的结果与时间平均转换在开/关和最小-最大的慢速模式和快速模式下进行比较分流比不同的操作。在增强的平均时间转换方面，所有流量已调制的案例都证明比稳态操作更有优势。然而，对于慢速操作模式，这种增强随着循环时间的增加而恶化。另外，这与总压降的大幅波动有关，这不利于过程安全。但是，在低分流比下，开-关和最小-最大操作的快速模式分别导致最大改善约47％和35％，这显示了快速模式流量调节在降低压降波动的情况下实现最大转换的功效。