Abstract: The boiling properties of smooth tube, sintered coated porous reactor tube and mechanically fabricated porous surface tube, and the effects of reactor structure parameters on boiling heat transfer were investigated in a pool boiling device. The effects of surface enhanced heat transfer on Fischer-Tropsch synthesis were studied in a fixed-bed reactor with three kinds of tubes, respectively. The results in pool boiling show that the heat transfer properties in enhanced surface tubes are better than the plain tube, resulting in lower incipient boiling superheat and earlier boiling. The heat transfer performance is different for sintered coated porous tube and mechanically fabricated porous surface tube at different heat flux ranges, but both can improve the F-T performance. However, the influence of heat transfer enhancement is not obvious for sintered coated porous reactor tube under lower CO conversion rate. With the increase of heat flux and improvement of heat transfer performance, the distribution of catalyst bed temperature becomes more even and the mechanically fabricated porous surface tube shows more obvious promotion for heat transfer. Under same reaction conditions, higher CO conversion and C5+ selectivity are observed. The mechanically fabricated porous surface tube could get higher wall heat transfer coefficient than that of sintered coated porous reactor tube.

Key words: Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, fixed-bed, enhanced heat transfer, sintered coated porous tube, mechanically fabricated porous surface tube