Title: Development of a downer reactor for fluid catalytic cracking Risers suffer from various shortcomings, such as backmixing

of particles along the reactor walls due to gravity, particle clustering and radial segregation of solids. This results in a wide residence time distribution of solids and may consequently prevent the process from reaching optimum gasoline yields Since in a down#ow reactor solids #ow in the direction of gravity, the #ow structure is much closer to plug #ow, resulting in a very narrow residence time distribution of the catalyst particles and very #at radial pro"les of solids concentration and solids and gas velocity (Wang et al., 1992; Zhu et al., 1995). The resulting short, uniform contact times between catalyst and gas are required to avoid excessive coke formation and overcracking. In future, this will become even more important in view of new, increasingly active catalysts (with even faster coke formation) and heavier FCC feed streams. Longer residence times and higher catalyst-to-oil ratios generally lead to higher conversions, however, as illustrated by the data in Fig. 8 and con"rmed in several other experiments, a higher CTO } and consequently a higher solids loading } not always leads to a higher conversion. The dependency on the third parameter } reactor temperature } was clear and in agreement with expectation: at higher temperatures higher conversions were obtained (Fig. 9). demonstrated the speci"c downer features of extremely short residence times (60}400 ms) and high catalyst-to-oil ratios (up to 60, with even higher values attainable). Even at those short residence times conversions of up to 70% were obtained at temperatures between 673}823 K. Comparison of the experimental data with a simple plug #ow model has shown that in most cases the experimentally determined conversions are in agreement with the model predictions at low solids loading and lower than these model values at higher solids loading. This supports the supposition that the gas}solids #ow in the downer was not homogeneously dispersed at high solids loading.
Maximization of FCC light olefins by high severity operation and ZSM-5 addition