Dissociation in a Tubular Reactor
Application ID: 221
Tubular reactors are often used in continuous large-scale production, for example in the petroleum industry. One key design parameter is the conversion, or the amount of reactant that reacts to form the desired product. In order to achieve high conversion, process engineers optimize the reactor design: its length, width and heating system. An accurate reactor model is a very useful tool, both at the design stage and in tuning an existing reactor.
This example deals with a gas-phase dissociation process, where species A reacts to form B. The model illustrates the use of several attractive features in the Chemical Reaction Engineering Module:
- The use of the Transport of Concentrated Species to account for multicomponent diffusion.
- How to couple the variable density to a Laminar Flow interface.
- Implementation of temperature- and composition-dependent reaction kinetics.
- The use of a mapped mesh, which is structured, to discretize a long and thin geometry, typical for tubular reactors
- How to include heat balances and how to couple these to both the mass balances and the velocity field
This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products:
however, additional products may be required to completely define and model it. Furthermore, this example may also be defined and modeled using components from the following product combinations:
- COMSOL Multiphysics® and
- either the Battery Design Module, Chemical Reaction Engineering Module, or Fuel Cell & Electrolyzer Module
The combination of COMSOL® products required to model your application depends on several factors and may include boundary conditions, material properties, physics interfaces, and part libraries. Particular functionality may be common to several products. To determine the right combination of products for your modeling needs, review the Tabella delle Funzionalità and make use of a free evaluation license. The COMSOL Sales and Support teams are available for answering any questions you may have regarding this.