Piston flow type reactor

A piston-flow-type reactor for dehydrogenation in continuous mode under superheated liquid-film conditions. 

Fig.3 Acontinuous reactor tor decalin ddrydn aratian of piston-flow type...

There are two important types of ideal, continuous-flow reactors the piston flow reactor or PFR, and the continuous-flow stirred tank reactor or CSTR. They behave very diflerently with respect to conversion and selectivity. The piston flow reactor behaves exactly like a batch reactor. It is usually visualized as a long tube as illustrated in Figure 1.3. Suppose a small clump of material enters the reactor at time t = 0 and flows from the inlet to the outlet. We suppose that there is no mixing between this particular clump and other clumps that entered at different times. The clump stays together and ages and reacts as it flows down the tube. After it has been in the piston flow reactor for t seconds, the clump will have the same composition as if it had been in a batch reactor for t seconds. The composition of a batch reactor varies with time. The composition of a small clump flowing through a piston flow reactor varies with time in the same way. It also varies with position down the tube. The relationship between time and position is... 

Chapter 1 treated the simplest type of piston flow reactor, one with constant density and constant reactor cross section. The reactor design equations for this type of piston flow reactor are directly analogous to the design equations for a constant-density batch reactor. What happens in time in the batch reactor happens in space in the piston flow reactor, and the transformation t = z/u converts one design equation to the other. For component A,... 

We have considered two types of ideal flow reactor the piston flow reactor and the perfectly mixed CSTR. These two ideal types can be connected together in a variety of series and parallel arrangements to give composite reactors that are... 

This chapter treats the effects of temperature on the three types of ideal reactors batch, piston flow, and continuous-flow stirred tank. Three major questions in reactor design are addressed. What is the optimal temperature for a reaction How can this temperature be achieved or at least approximated in practice How can results from the laboratory or pilot plant be scaled up ... 

One other type of reactor allows this in principle. Dijferential reactors are so short that concentrations and temperatures do not change appreciably from their inlet values. However, the small change in concentration makes it very hard to determine an accurate rate. The use of dilferential reactors is not recommended. If a CSTR cannot be used, a batch or piston flow reactor is preferred over a dilferential reactor even though the reaction rate is not measured directly but must be inferred from measured outlet concentrations. 

Aqueous hydrogen peroxide of a given concentration was poured into a vessel with a piston pump, which continuously injected it into the reactor. Methane was supplied from a gas cylinder with pressure sensors at the output. It was purified and dried, then heated and injected into the reactor. The reaction system is of a homogeneous (non-catalytic) flow type and operates in plug flow mode. 

Piston flow reactors and most other flow reactors have spatial variations in concentration such as fl = a z). Such systems are called distributed. Their behavior is governed by an ODE when there is only one spatial variable and by a partial differential equation (PDE) when there are two or three spatial variables or when the system has a spatial variation and also varies with time. We turn now to a special type of flow reactor where the entire reactor volume is well mixed and has the same concentration, temperature, pressure, and so forth. There are no spatial variations in... 

Figure 8.1 gives conversion curves for an isothermal, first-order reaction in various types of reactor. The curves for a PFR and CSTR are from Equations 1.38 and 1.49. The curve for laminar flow without diffusion is obtained from Equation 8.14 and the software of Example 8.2. Without diffusion, the laminar flow reactor performs better than a CSTR but worse that a PFR. Add radial diffusion and the performance improves. This is illustrated by the curve in Figure 8.1 that is between those for laminar flow without di ffusion and piston flow. The intermediate curve is one member of a family of such curves that depends on theparameter f// . IfL // is small, <... 

The tubular reactor is so named because the physical configuration of the reactor is normally such that the reaction takes place within a tube or length of pipe. The idealized model of this type of reactor is based on the assumption that an entering fluid element moves through the reactor as a differentially thin plug of material that fills the reactor cross section completely. Thus, the terms piston flow or plug flow reactor (PFR) are often employed to describe the idealized model. The contents of a specific differential plug are presumed to be uniform in temperature and composition. This model may be used to treat both the case where the tube is packed with a solid catalyst (see Section 12.1) and the case where the fluid phase alone is present. 

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