Ideal Reactors as an Illustration of Solving Transport Phenomena Problems in Engineering

Abstract

This contribution aims at emphasizing the importance of ideal reactors in the field of environmental engineering and in the education of the corresponding engineers. The exposition presents the mass flow governing equations of the ideal reactors (batch, completely mixed flow, and plug flow reactors) as particular cases derived from the integral version of the conservation of mass of a chemical/biological species. In the case of transient problems and simple kinetics, such expressions result in first-order ordinary differential equations amenable to be solved analytically when they are linear. In this article, it is shown that when they are non-linear, due to the presence of a second-order kinetics reaction, an analytical solution is also possible, a situation not dealt with in the textbooks. Finally, the previous findings are integrated into a teaching proposal addressed to help undergraduate students to solve more efficiently ideal reactor problems.