Moving Bed Reactors: Challenges and Progress of Experimental and Theoretical Studies in a Century of Research

Moving bed reactors (MBRs) have been proposed as a sign of significant progress in the reaction engineering area for performance improving and energy saving. Since their advent in 1890, the MBRs have attracted a wide acceptance in different industries, while they were first developed for the drying industries. The progress that this technology has made during its evolution led to the introduction of these reactors as a pioneer strategy in other industries including petroleum, petrochemical, pyrolysis, and biomass industries. In the traditional reaction systems, the process performance decreases during the operational conditions, while MBRs have obviated this drawback by having an all-around permanent acceptable efficiency. In this context, the present work provides an overview on the evolution of MBRs by investigating the main experimental and theoretical studies. In this way, the experimental studies have typically taken into account operational conditions and production rates of different products, while in the theoretical research, modeling, and simulation of conventional processes, the evaluation of novel configurations and the optimization techniques have been investigated. In the end, some suggestions are proposed to modify the traditional MBRs as helpful ideas for further studies.