Presentazioni e Articoli Tecnici

TAP (Temporary Analysis of Products) reactors are powerful instruments to study the kinetics of catalytic reactions. Their basic principle, exposition of evacuated solids of interest to narrow pulses containing very small amounts of gases, and measuring the concentrations of outgoing molecules permits to study practical catalysts under the conditions approaching those of molecular beam experiments. However, because of the complex geometry of TAP instruments and intrinsically transient character of TAP experiments, the extraction of kinetic constants from obtained experimental data may present an arduous task. Since the phenomena occurring in this case include essentially time-dependent gas flow in systems with complex geometries, COMSOL is particularly well adapted to simulate these phenomena and to check the validity of particular simplifying hypotheses. In this study COMSOL has been used to compare different approaches to the interpretation of TAP results, between 1D modeling of the reactor alone and 3D modeling of the ensemble.