Physical Characteristics of Microreactors

As already mentioned, the solid polymer is structurally nonuniform and represents an array of regions differed in packing of segments of macromolecules, density, and molecular mobility. If some physical (diffusion of the gas or dilute) or chemical processes (decomposition, recombination of particles, bimolecular reaction) occurs in the polymer, the polymer is as if a set of microreactors in each of which the process occurs with its intrinsic rate characteristics. Since in the polymer the reaction occurs in the rigid cage, all bimolecular processes controlled by both diffusion and kinetics occur in different microvolumes of the polymer in different ways. 

The experimental investigation of microscale devices is hindered by many technical limitations, permitting only the acquisition of a rather narrow range of experimental data, unsuitable for an in-depth analysis of the aforementioned devices operational characteristics. In view of the absence of such sets of experimental data for catalytic microreactors/microcombustors, detailed numerical models prove to be invaluable in providing insight on the particular physics of hetero-Zhomogeneous combustion processes in the microscale. 

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