4. Industrial reactor technology and operation

4.1 Hydrodynamics

As the empty-barrel gas velocity increases (at constant gas composi-tion), the amount of SO ₂ that presents itself to the catalyst per unit time increases and consequently the conversion percentage decreases.

In practice, the gas velocity in industrial reactors is between 0.3 and 0.5 Nm ³ .m ^–2 .s ^–1 [8] . Figure 10 shows the variation...