Reactor Design for Producing Exothermic Liquid Phase Reactions

Question

You need to design a reactor (or reactors) to selectively produce desired products B and C from A, while minimizing production of the undesired product U, subject to the following exothermic liquid phase reactions:

A → B+C     r_B = 1.6 x 10⁹e^{-(115,000 /T)}C^A         ∆H= -47 kJ/mol
A → U         r_U =3.7 X 10¹²e^-(85,000/T)C_A²         âˆ†H = -82 kJ/mol

You have the flexibility to choose the type of reactor(s), residence time, inlet reactant concentrations, operating temperature(s) and other design features.

a. What type of reactor(s) and operating conditions would you select in order to maximize the yield of B?

b. Would your choices differ if your objective was to maximize the selectivity to B?

c. Develop the material and energy balance relationships for these reactions if they occurred in a batch reactor, and you wanted to track components and temperatures as a function of reaction time.

Summary

The question belongs to Chemical Engineering and the question is about designing reactors for producing chemical products from exothermic liquid phase reactions. The operating conditions of the reactors, the temperature and other design features and material and energy balance relationship between the reactions in batch reactor have to be calculated. The solution has all the details clearly given.

Note: The answers are in handwritten format