Details

In this Demonstration, the height of the batch reactor is equal to the inner diameter, so reactor volume and surface area can be simplified to:

,

,

where us the reactor surface area (), is reactor volume (), and and are the height and diameter of the reactor where (cm).

Mass and energy balances are done to get the temperature of the reactor and moles in the reactor:

,

,

,

,

,

where are moles of (mol), is the concentration of (), the subscript refers to the initial condition, and are the reaction and cooling liquid temperatures (K), is time (min), is the rate of reaction (), is heat capacity of (J/[mol K]), is the heat of reaction (J/mol), is the heat transfer coefficient (), is the pre-exponential factor (1/min), is activation energy (J/mol), and is the ideal gas constant (J/[mol K]).

A screencast video at [1] shows how to use this Demonstration. A video at [2] shows a real-life example of the danger associated with the scale-up of a batch reactor.

References

[1] Scale-Up of a Batch Reactor. www.colorado.edu/learncheme/kinetics/BatchReactorScaleUp.html.

[2] Runaway: Explosion at T2 Laboratories [Video]. (Sept 21, 2009) www.youtube.com/watch?v=C561PCq5E1g.