Variation of Conversion with Reaction Order in a Plug Flow Reactor
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Consider an irreversible liquid phase reaction, , taking place in a plug-flow reactor. The feed concentration is
and the volumetric flow rate is
. The reaction rate law is
where you can vary the reaction order,
, and the reaction rate constant is held constant (e.g.,
). A differential mole balance gives:
where
is the volume of the plug flow reactor,
is the conversion given by
, and
is the feed flow rate of species
. This Demonstration plots the conversion,
versus the volume,
, for various values of the reaction order. It is found that the conversion gets lower when the reaction order is increased.
Contributed by: Housam Binous (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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Reference: M. B. Cutlip and M. Shacham, Problem Solving in Chemical Engineering with Numerical Methods, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999 (Example 8.2, "Variation of Conversion with Reaction Order in a Plug-Flow Reactor").