Shock effects near equilibrium

The apparatus s step change from ambient to desired reaction conditions eliminates transport effects between catalyst surface and gas phase reactants. Using catalytic reactors that are already used in industry enables easy transfer from the shock tube to a ffow reactor for practical performance evaluation and scale up. Moreover, it has capability to conduct temperature- and pressure-jump relaxation experiments, making this technique useful in studying reactions that operate near equilibrium. Currently there is no known experimental, gas-solid chemical kinetic method that can achieve this. 

A plot of the observed rate constants k obtained by analysis of static- and flow-system data [1,8, 9,10] and of shock-tube data [12,13,14] with the assumption k = k shows that the former investigations yielded higher k values than the latter one, probably due to surface effects in the static and flow systems. Above about 1000 K the k values level off because the rate-controlling step (1) is near equilibrium. For further discussion, see [14]. 

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