Simulating the effects of mixing on the performance of unpremixed flow chemical reactors

A parallel three environment model is developed to describe the effects of incomplete mixing on the performance of continuous flow chemical reactors fed separately by feedstreams which may have arbitrary flowrate and arbitrary residence time distribution. Unpremixed reactants are assumed to first enter partially segregated entering environments and subsequently transfer to partially mixed leaving environments at a rate and in amounts defined by an environment transfer function. Mixing in the environments is stimulated stochastically by Monte Carlo techniques. Calculations based on a kinetic model of the Michaelis-Menten type for arbitrarily selected pairs of residence time distributions suggest that performance is strongly influenced by the degree of overlap of the distributions and the method of feeding the reactants. The model is shown to compare directly with published experimental data obtained from a “jet-stirred” reactor and an equivalence found between the models' parameters and those of previously developed micromixing models.