CAPE5330: You have completed RTD experiments on each of the reactors: Advanced Reaction Engineering Coursework, UOL, UK

Part 1    You have completed RTD experiments on each of the reactors. You used the plants fixed flow pump (20L/hr). The data sets in table 1, shows two experiments, with each concentration column being the result of an ideal pulse at t=0 to the inlet of a single reactor.

Your boss, an reaction experienced engineer, used convolution,

to predict the concentration resulting of a pulse into R1 flowing through R1 and then R2 (see also code snippet below).

Function C_R2afterR1 (CR1, ER2, dt)

‘ comments:

‘ CR1      A vector with n concentrations coming out of reactor 1 (t=k*dt)

‘ ER2:     the exit age distribution for reactor 2 with n points

‘ dt:        the time step for the data

n = CR1.Count ‘get the number of elements in CR1 and ER2

Dim s(n) ‘ create an empty vector with n elements

For k = 1 To n

s(k) = 0

For i = 0 To k – 1

s(k) = s(k) + CR1(k – i) * ER2(i) * dt

Next ‘value of i

Next  ‘value of k

C_R2afterR1 = s

End Function

• Q1 You want to know the combined RTD, , of reactor 1 and 2 in series (first R1, then R2).  Describe how you can arrive at the residence time distribution of the system  from the data in table 1. Please explain how you would do this, and exemplify by calculating
• Q2 You propose piloting the destruction of 20L/hr of A (0.05 mol/L) with B (0.4 mol/L). Can a conversion of 99.9% be achieved using just one reactor if the reaction is
• Q3 To implement the process described in Q2, the plant decides to use reactor 2, and purchase a new plugflow reactor to put in series after reactor 2. If the conversion in reactor 2 is 80%, what plugflow reactor’s volume is required to achieve 99.99% conversion of A?