AUTOCATALYTIC REACTIONS IN PLUG-FLOW AND DIFFUSION REACTORS

AUTOCATALYTIC REACTIONS IN PLUG-FLOW AND DIFFUSION REACTORS 

Well-stirred systems are particularly convenient for the theoretician but are often less easy to realize in practice. Indeed, spatial inhomogeneities, with consequent molecular diffusion or thermal conduction processes, arise in many important situations—as varied as a single biological cell and a haystack. In the next three chapters we turn to unstirred systems, again seeking to determine bifurcation phenomena driven by non-linear kinetics. 

After careful study of this chapter, the reader should be able to  

The previous chapters have discussed the behaviour of non-linear chemical systems in the two most familiar experimental contexts the well-stirred closed vessel and the well-stirred continuous-flow reactor. Now we turn to a number of other situations. First we introduce the plug-flow reactor, which has strong analogies with the classic closed vessel and which will also lead on to our investigation of chemical wave propagation in chapter 11. Then we relax the stirring condition. This allows diffusive processes to become important and to interact with the chemistry. In this chapter, we examine one form of the reaction-diffusion cell, whose behaviour can be readily understood by comparison with the responses observed in the CSTR. 

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