Chaos Predictability in a Chemical Reactor

Abstract

The dynamics of the tubular chemical reactor with mass recycle was examined. In such a system, temperature and concentrations may oscillate chaotically. This means that state variable values are then unpredictable. In this paper, it has been shown that despite the chaos, the behavior of such a reactor can be predictable. It has been shown that this phenomenon can occur in two cases. The first case concerns intermittent chaos. It has been shown that intermittent outbursts can occur at regular intervals. The second case concerns transient chaos, i.e. a situation when chaos occurs only for a certain period of time, e.g. only during start-up. This phenomenon makes it impossible to predict what will occur in the reactor in the nearest time, but, makes it possible to precisely determine the values of the variables even in the distant future. Both of these phenomena were tested by numerical simulation of the mathematical model of the reactor.