Chemical Reactor Analysis and Design Fundamentals James B. Rawlings Department of Chemical Engineering University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin John G. Ekerdt Department of Chemical Engineering The University of Texas Austin, Texas wey Publishing Madison, WisconsinThis book was set in Lucida using WIyX, and printed and bound by Worzalla Cover design by Cheryl M. and James B. Rawlings, and John W. Eaton. Copyright © 2002 Nob Hill Publishing, All rights reserved, Nob Hill Publishing Cheryl M. Rawlings, publisher Madison, WI 53705 nobhi11@g1obaldiatog.com http://www. global dialog. com/~nobhi1 No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, Library of Congress Control Number: 2001135832 Rawlings, Janes B, Chemica) Reactor Analysis and Design Fundamentals / by James 8. Rawlings and John G, Ekerdt. p.m, Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-615-11884-4 (Toth) 1. Chemical reactors. I. Ekerdt, John G. IE. Title. Printed in the United States of America, w98 7654323 To Cheryl, Melanie and Blake, and Carol, Alice and Barbara, for their love and encouragement.sonnei Preface Chemical reactors are at the core of the chemical engineering discipline, and chemical reactor analysis and design is one of the distinguishing courses that clearly separates the chemical engineers from the other engineering professionals. Given that chemical reactor analysis and design is a mature and stable topic in the curriculum of chemical engi: neering, however, it is natural to ask what is the motivation for a new text on this topic. We offer our motivations here. This book grew out of the combined experience of the two authors teaching this subject to undergradu- ates for more than 30 years. Given the rapidly changing landscape of scale and type of reactors of interest to practicing chemical engi- neers (chemical vapor deposition reactors, pharmaceutical fermentors, micro-reactors, as well as traditional catalytic crackers, bulk polymer- ization reactors, etc), it seems unwise to emphasize one industrial sec- tor and treat its reactor types in detail. Practicing chemical engineers work in a broad array of industrial sectors, and many will change sec tors during their carcers. IF chemical engineering has any important distinguishing characteristic, it is a set of fundamentals that apply to all scales and all types of reaction and transport processes involving ‘chemical change. ‘This bookiis all about reactor fundamentals. Rather than presenting ‘many facts about reactors, we focus on the framework for how to think about reactors — a framework for thinking that enables one, with some experience, to establish any of these facts for oneself, and discover new facts given new situations. All engineering and science textbooks do this to some extent; in this text, we will do it to a rather large extent. Computations matter in this subject. Reactor fundamentals, like the fundamentals in any subject, are few in number. But he diversity of the consequences of these fundamentals is enormous, Computational approaches provide a powerful and general approach to systematically investigating these consequences without making unrealistic simplify- ing assumptions. We attempt to exploit the significant advances in computing algorithms, software, and hardware in order to revise and streamline the presentation of reactor fundamentals. We focus on two high-level languages intended for numerical computation, Octave and