Consider a first-order reaction in a real reactor where chemical reaction and dispersion are occurring. The Demonstration plots the ratio of the volumes of the real and plug flow reactors as a function of , where is the reactor's conversion. You can change the value of the dispersion dimensionless group , where is the dispersion coefficient due to axial mixing, is the reactor's length, and is the fluid's velocity. With near zero one recovers the plug flow behavior. As , the behavior of a mixed flow reactor is observed.