CL 303

Chemical Reaction Engineering-I

Dr. Raghvendra Gupta

Assistant Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati

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 Lecture information
Monday: 9:00 AM
Tuesday: 10:00 AM
Wednesday: 11:00 AM
Generally tutorial
Instructors: Prof. B P Mandal (HOD) and Dr. R. Gupta
Consultation hours: MTW 12:00-1:00 PM (AR-004)
Make-up: for genuine cases only.

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Study Material
Books:
Textbooks
Chemical reaction engineering: O. Levenspiel, 3rd edition
Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering: Fogler, 4th edition
Reference books
Chemical engineering kinetics: J M Smith

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Evaluation Scheme (Tentative)

Hour examinations (2)+Assignment 20

Mid Semester Exam 30
End Semester Exam 50
Total 100

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Chemical Engineer
Let us get to know a bit more about Chemical Engineering:

-Where do Chemical Engineers get the job?

- As a Chemical Engineer
- What are the typical salaries?
- How to get in there?
- Assignment
- Create a refined database on Google docs
- Two admins required
- No benefits in the evaluation

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Chemical Engineer
Let us get to know a bit more about Chemical Engineering:
-Where do Chemical Engineers get the job?
- As a Chemical Engineer
- What are the typical salaries?
- How to get in there?
- Assignment
- Create a refined database on Google docs
- Two admins required
- No benefits in the evaluation
- Refined:
- Name of the company
- Website
- Job profile
- How to get the job/ Internship
- Do we have a friend/senior there?

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Chemical Engineering

Chemical
Engineer

Laboratory to the Plant

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Chemical Engineer

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 Chemical Engineer
What do we need to know?

How to perform reactions for mass production of chemicals?

Design a big enough reactor?

How do we put reactants and take product out?

In batches?
OR
A continuous mode would be better?
If so, how can we do that?

This is what we would try to learn about in this course.

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 Chemical Engineer
How does the flow happen in the channel?
Fluid dynamics
We need to know more about the reaction?
What pressure, temperature, intermediates, byproducts, catalysts:
Chemical Reaction Engineering
What is the favourable reaction temperature for a certain product? How can
we maintain the temperature?
Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer
How to separate the products?
Separation processes, mass transfer
How do the reactants mix?
Mass transfer

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 Chemical Engineer
What should be the material of the reactor, channels and other equipments?
Material science
How do we control the plant manually/automatically?
Process control
Can I virtually simulate before constructing the equipment / plant?
Modelling and simulation
Transport Phenomena
If the reaction is biological?
Biochemical engineering

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 Chemical Engineer
Is it safe? Does the mass production put human life at risk?
Safety, risk and hazard analysis (HAZOP: Hazard and operability
study)
All this fine, but how much does it cost?
Process economics
Can the reaction be carried out at small scale and in number of reactors?
Chemical micro-processing, Microfluidics
New materials: Nanotechnology

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Lecture 2

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 Chemical Reaction Engineering-I
What are we going to study in this course?
Let us simplify things:
Consider only homogeneous reactions
What are these?
Ideal Reactors
Batch or continuous
Batch: perfectly mixed
Continuous
Perfect mixing- CSTR
No axial mixing- PFR

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 Chemical Reaction Engineering-I
What are we going to study in this course?
Let us simplify things:
Consider only homogeneous reactions
Chapter 1-6
What are these? Levenspiel
Ideal Reactors
Batch or continuous Chapter 1-5
Fogler
Batch: perfectly mixed
Continuous
Perfect mixing- CSTR
No axial mixing- PFR
Isothermal reactor
Single reaction

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 Chemical Reaction Engineering-I
Let us start relaxing the assumptions one by one:

Multiple reactions
Levenspiel: Chapters 7, 8
Parallel Reactions Fogler: Chapter 6
Series Reactions
Complex Reactions
Levenspiel: Chapters 9
Non-isothermal Reactions Fogler: Chapters 8,9
Levenspiel: Chapters 11-16
Non-ideal reactors Fogler: Chapters 13, 14

Heterogeneous reactions are dealt with in CRE-2

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 Batch Reactor
Uniform concentration varying with time
High conversion
Easy to clean
Flexibility of operation (different products)
High labour cost per batch
variability of product from one batch to other
Difficulty of large scale production

Examples
Pressure cooker/ pan (constant V / P)
Pharmaceutical Industry
Fermentation
Dairy industry

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 Continuous flow reactors (CSTR)
Also known as backmix reactor
Primarily used for homogeneous liquid phase flow reactions
Concentration uniform everywhere in the reactor
Exit concentration same as in the reactor

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Continuous flow reactors (CSTR)

A Cell culture reactor (Copyright New Brunswick Scientific, Edison, NJ)

Source: http://encyclopedia.che.engin.umich.edu/Pages/Reactors/CSTR/CSTR.html

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 Continuous flow reactors (PFR)

Oxidation of nitrogen compounds

(Copyright Robert Hesketh,
Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ)

Wide variety of applications in either gas or liquid phase systems

Gasoline production, oil cracking, ammonia synthesis, SO2 oxidation to SO3

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 Continuous flow reactors (PFR)

tubular bioreactor for the production of algae

(Copyright W2 Energy, Inc., Carson City, NV)
Source: http://encyclopedia.che.engin.umich.edu/Pages/Reactors/PFR/PFR.html
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 PFR

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 The Performance/Design equation
The most used principle in Chemical Engineering

Moles out per

unit time, FA
Moles in per
unit time, FA0

Mass/mole balance: In- out+ generation/consumption = Accumulation

NA= Number of moles in the reactor

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 Reference material
Material covered:
Chapter 1 of Fogler & Chapter 1 of Levenspiel
Chapter 3 of Fogler & Chapter 2 of Levenspiel

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 Rate of Reaction
To solve the equation, we need to know rA as a function of
concentration

rA= f (C)

What is rate?

- Defined with respect to a component (reactant or product)

- If the rate of change in number of moles of the component A
due to reaction is dNA/dt, rate of reaction can be defined as

Where V = unit volume of reacting fluid

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 Rate of Reaction
To solve the equation, we need to know rA as a function of
concentration

rA= f (C)

What is rate?

- Defined with respect to a component (reactant or product)

- If the rate of change in number of moles of the component A
due to reaction is dNA/dt, rate of reaction can be defined as

Where V = unit volume of reacting fluid

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Rate of Reaction
Based on unit mass of solid in fluid-solid systems

Based on unit interfacial surface in two-fluid systems or based on

unit surface of solid in gas-solid systems

Based on unit volume of solid in gas-solid systems

Based on unit volume of Reactor

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Rate of Reaction
You can work out the unit of rA in each case.

The relationship between different rate expressions

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Rate of Reaction
Speed of reaction

Time scale of reaction ~ 1sec to few years

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 Basic definitions
Homogeneous reaction: One phase
Heterogeneous reaction: 2 or more phases, interface

Irreversible reaction
Reversible reaction

Molecularity: Number of atoms, molecules or ions

involved in a reaction step

Unimolecular
Bimolecular
Trimolecular
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