This work investigates the measure and characterisation of heat transfer in slurry bubble column reactors equipped with a bundle of cooling tubes. The value of the shell-tube heat transfer coefficient is estimated at thermal steady-state regime using heat transfer equations. A 15 cm in diameter, 4 m high bubble column, equipped with a two U-tubes (3 cm O.D.) bundle has been used to assess the metrology selected. The cooling fluid was water. Air-Syltherm XLT® heat transfer fluid and air-Syltherm XLT® heat transfer fluid-porous alumina particles (dS ~ 80 μm) were successively used as shell fluids. The uncertainty of our measures has been estimated to be around 8 %. The variations of the shell-tube heat transfer coefficient with superficial gas velocity can be modelled using the well-known correlation by Deckwer (1980). However, a smaller constant value than indicated by Deckwer et al. (1980) was obtained and it was found to be dependent upon the orientation of the tube bundle relatively to the column axis. This has never been reported in the literature and implies that any difference relatively to the ideal tube bundle – perfectly straight and symmetric – might be critical for heat transfer. Addition of solid particles has little effect on heat transfer for solid concentrations below 18.8 %w/w. A further increase up to 21.3 %w/w induced a 10 % decrease of the value of the shell-tube heat transfer coefficient. This was surprising, as existing literature results display continuous variations of the heat transfer coefficient values in the range of solid concentrations tested, even though trends of variation could be opposite. The assessed metrology was implemented into a 1 m in diameter, 5 m high bubble column equipped with a 24 U-tubes (6 cm O.D.) bundle. This pilot plant was considered to be large enough to mock up a slurry bubble column reactor for the Fischer-Tropsch process. First results indicate that thermal characterisation will be more complex than for the smaller diameter column
