Plug flow reactor, adiabatic operation design

Continuous plug flow reactors are also unsuitable for these purposes because it is usually impossible to obtain an isothermic mode in such reactors, even for reactions with a relatively low rate of reaction. Plug flow reactors usually operate in adiabatic or intermediate modes, which are far from isothermic even with an external heat removal modification. In can be stated that almost all industrial reactors employed for fast processes are not optimally designed and are therefore ineffective. The quality of products is also far from optimal and the processes are generally not perfect from an engineering, economical, or social point of view (decrease of final product yield and quality, increase of nonrecyclable wastes, excessively high consumption of raw materials and low energy efficiency). 

Industrial reactors generally operate adiabatically. Cholette and Blanchet [8] compared adiabatic plug flow reactor to the CSTRmm. For exothermic reactions, they inferred that the performance of a CSTRmm is better than that of a plug flow reactor at low values of conversion, and vice-versa at high values of conversion. They further showed that the design considerations for endothermic reactions are similar to those for isothermal reactions. 

No real reactor is either perfectly mixed or in pure plug flow. An interpolating procedure to bridge the factor of 3 is needed for the rational design and safe operation of adiabatic reactors. 

We noted earlier in this chapter that many reactions in the chemical industries are exothermic and require heat removal. A simple way of meeting this objective is to design an adiabatic reactor. The reaction heat is then automatically exported with the hot exit stream. No control system is required, making this a preferred way of designing the process. However, adiabatic operation may not always be feasible. In plug-flow systems the exit temperature may be too hot due to a minimum inlet temperature and the adiabatic temperature rise. Systems with baekmixing suffer from other problems in that they face the awkward possibilities of multiplicity and open-loop instability. The net result is that we need external cooling on many industrial reactors. This also carries with it a control system to ensure that the correct amount of heat is removed at all times. 

Parametric Sensitivity. One last feature of packed-bed reactors that is perhaps worth mentioning is the so-called "parametric sensitivity" problem. For exothermic gas-solid reactions occurring in non-adiabatic packed-bed reactors, the temperature profile in some cases exhibits extreme sensitivity to the operational conditions. For example, a relatively small increase in the feed temperature, reactant concentration in the feed, or the coolant temperature can cause the hot-spot temperature to increase enormously (cf. 54). This sensitivity is a type of instability, which is important to understand for reactor design and operation. The problem was first studied by Bilous and Amundson (55). Various authors (cf. 57) have attempted to provide estimates of the heat of reaction and heat transfer parameters defining the parametrically sensitive region for the plug-flow pseudohomogeneous model, critical values of these parameters can now be obtained for any reaction order rather easily (58). 

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