Heat diffusion effect

Weisz, P. B. and Hicks, J. S., The behaviour of porous catalyst particles in view of internal mass and heat diffusion effects, Chem. Eng. Sci., 17, 265-275 (1962). 

At a later stage of bubble growth, heat diffusion effects are controlling (as point c in Fig. 2.9), and the solution to the coupled momentum and heat transfer equations leads to the asymptotic solutions and is closely approximated by the leading term of the Plesset-Zwick (1954) solution,... 

Effectiveness factors for a first-order reaction in a spherical, nonisothermal catalysts pellet. (Reprinted from R B. Weisz and J. S. Hicks, The Behavior of Porous Catalyst Particles in View of Internal Mass and Heat Diffusion Effects, Chem. Eng. Sci., 17 (1962) 265, copyright 1962, with permission from Elsevier Science.)... 

It is important to note that the results in activity and selectivity were obtained at low conversion (< 15%) to avoid mass and heat diffusion effects. The results then are not a hmction of the conversion degree. 

Differential heats of NH adsorption were measured for the samples outgassed at different temperatures ranging from 400 to 800°C. Ammonia was chosen as a basic probe because its size is small, which may limitate diffusion effects in small pore zeolite materials. The variations of the differential heats of adsorption are plotted in fig. 3 as a function of the successive pulses of... 

When reaction conditions within the particle are non-isothermal. Weisz and Hicks [8] showed that a suitable criterion defining conditions under which a reaction is not controlled by diffusion and heat transfer effects in the solid is... 

Satterfield (S2, S3) carried out a number of interesting macroscopic studies of simultaneous thermal and material transfer. This work was done in connection with the thermal decomposition of hydrogen peroxide and yielded results indicating that for the relatively low level of turbulence experienced the thermal transport did not markedly influence the material transport. However, the results obtained deviated by 10 to 20 from the commonly accepted macroscopic methods of correlating heat and material transfer data. The final expression proposed by Satterfield (S3), neglecting the thermal diffusion effect (S19) in the boundary layer, was written as... 

The following, well-acceptable assumptions are applied in the presented models of automobile exhaust gas converters Ideal gas behavior and constant pressure are considered (system open to ambient atmosphere, very low pressure drop). Relatively low concentration of key reactants enables to approximate diffusion processes by the Fick s law and to assume negligible change in the number of moles caused by the reactions. Axial dispersion and heat conduction effects in the flowing gas can be neglected due to short residence times ( 0.1 s). The description of heat and mass transfer between bulk of flowing gas and catalytic washcoat is approximated by distributed transfer coefficients, calculated from suitable correlations (cf. Section III.C). All physical properties of gas (cp, p, p, X, Z>k) and solid phase heat capacity are evaluated in dependence on temperature. Effective heat conductivity, density and heat capacity are used for the entire solid phase, which consists of catalytic washcoat layer and monolith substrate (wall). 

When the internal diffusion effects are considered explicitly, concentration variations in the catalytic washcoat layer are modeled both in the axial (z) and the transverse (radial, r) directions. Simple slab geometry is chosen for the washcoat layer, since the ratio of the washcoat thickness to the channel diameter is low. The layer is characterized by its external surface density a and the mean thickness <5. It can be assumed that there are no temperature gradients in the transverse direction within the washcoat layer and in the wall of the channel because of the sufficiently high heat conductivity, cf., e.g. Wanker et al. 

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