UNDERSTANDING CONTINUOUS REACTORS AND TRANSPORT PHENOMENA

At the end of the 1930s, some research work was published on the coupling between chemical reaction rates and mass transfer. The Russian physicist D.A. Frank-Kamenetskii developed a theory for coupled chemical reactions and mass transfer on nonporous solid surfaces in connection with combustion processes. This work remained ignored for a long 

The very mathematical orientation of chemical reaction engineering led to avant-garde research on American soil. Professor Neil Amundson from Minnesota pubhshed a pioneering work on the stabihty of chemical reactors, and professor Rutherford Aris from the same university published a monumental treatise on reaction and diffusion in porous catalysts. In parallel, the optimization aspects of chemical reactors were developed further by many 

The exciting issue of steady-state multiplicity has attracted the attention of many researchers. First the focus was on exothermic reactions in continuous stirred tanks, and later on catalyst pellets and dispersed flow reactors as well as on multiplicity originating from complex isothermal kinetics. Nonisothermal catalyst pellets can exhibit steady-state multiplicity for exothermic reactions, as was demonstrated by P.B. Weitz and J.S. Hicks in a classical paper in the Chemical Engineering Science in 1962. The topic of multiplicity and oscillations has been put forward by many researchers such as D. Luss, V. Balakotaiah, V. Hlavacek, M. Marek, M. Kubicek, and R. Schmitz. Bifurcation theory has proved to be very useful in the search for parametric domains where multiple steady states might appear. Moreover, steady-state multiplicity has been confirmed experimentally, one of the classical papers being that of A. Vejtassa and R.A. Schmitz in the AIChE Journal in 1970, where the multiple steady states of a CSTR with an exothermic reaction were elegantly illustrated. 

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