Chemical Reactor Analysis and Design Fundamentals - Softcover

Rawlings, James B.; Ekerdt, John G.

9780975937778: Chemical Reactor Analysis and Design Fundamentals

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0975937774 ISBN 13: 9780975937778

Verlag: Nob Hill Publishing, LLC, 2024

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Chemical reactors are at the core of the chemical engineering
discipline, and chemical reactor analysis and design is one of the
distinguishing courses that clearly separates the chemical engineers
from the other engineering professionals.
Given that chemical reactor analysis and design is a mature and stable
topic in the curriculum of chemical engineering, however, it is
natural to ask what is the motivation for a new text on this topic.

We offer our motivations here. This book grew out of the combined
experience of the two authors teaching this subject to undergraduates
for more than 30 years. Given the rapidly changing landscape of scale
and type of reactors of interest to practicing chemical engineers
(chemical vapor deposition reactors, pharmaceutical fermentors,
micro-reactors, as well as traditional catalytic crackers, bulk
polymerization reactors, etc.), it seems unwise to emphasize one
industrial sector and treat its reactor types in detail. Practicing
chemical engineers work in a broad array of industrial sectors, and
many will change sectors during their careers. If chemical
engineering has any important distinguishing characteristic, it is a
set of fundamentals that apply to all scales and all types of reaction
and transport processes involving chemical change.

This book is all about reactor fundamentals. Rather than presenting
many facts about reactors, we focus on the framework for how to think
about reactors---a framework for thinking that enables one, with
some experience, to establish any of these facts for oneself, and
discover new facts given new situations. All engineering and science
textbooks do this to some extent; in this text, we will do it to a
rather large extent.

Computations matter in this subject. Reactor fundamentals, like the
fundamentals in any subject, are few in number. But the diversity of
the consequences of these fundamentals is enormous. Computational
approaches provide a powerful and general approach to systematically
investigating these consequences without making unrealistic
simplifying assumptions. We attempt to exploit the significant
advances in computing algorithms, software, and hardware in order to
revise and streamline the presentation of reactor fundamentals. We
focus on two high-level languages intended for numerical computation,
Octave and Matlab. Octave is freely available for a variety of
hardware platforms and can be downloaded from
www.octave.org. Matlab is commercially
available from The MathWorks, Inc., and is becoming a commonly
available tool of industrial engineering practice. These languages
allow us to focus on essentials and ignore programming details, which
is the goal of any ``high-level'' language.

Students should not feel compelled to recall the detailed information
in the figures, but recall only the concepts, principles and main
results. Students will have the computational tools to recreate
the figures in this or any other textbook on this subject. For
example, all calculations required for the figures in this
text were performed with Octave.
Students should not feel compelled to memorize design equations for
reactor types. The goal is to develop sufficient expertise so that
students can set up appropriate models from the basic principles for each
new problem they encounter. That is the time-tested way to instill
confidence that one can analyze a new situation, which we fully expect
to be the experience of practicing engineers.