RTD as a Diagnostic Tool

Diagnosing the non-ideality does not stop with finding out if the reaction vessel is ideal or non-ideal. On knowing that the reactor is non-ideal, it is necessary to predict the impact of non-ideality on the reactor performance, which is the conversion achievable in the reactor. For this, the non-ideality has to be quantified first. Quantification of non-ideality involves assigning some kind of metric or measure for the extent of deviation from ideality. By comparing the RTD of the reaction vessel with the RTD of ideal reactors, one can get a qualitative idea about the gap or deviation between the real and the ideal reactors. Fiowever, one has to come up with an appropriate quantification of this gap in such a manner that this quantification will be useful for predicting the conversion achievable in the reactor. 

A general approach for quantification of non-ideality is to propose a mathematical model for characterising the non-ideality and make an estimate of model parameters using the RTD obtained from the tracer experiment. The estimated values of the model parameters are taken as a quantification of non-ideality. Some of the non-ideal reactor models are presented in the following sections. 

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