Chemical Reaction Engineering : Beyond the Fundamentals

This up-to-date textbook fills a longstanding gap for graduate courses in chemical reaction engineering. It explores the interplay between transport processes and reaction kinetics, multiphase reactions and reactors, and optimization and reactor stability. The book includes a brief review of major concepts, describes chemical kinetics and its relation to thermodynamics and transport phenomena, and addresses reactor classification and reactor design for increasingly complex situations. It helps readers to develop the facility to apply engineering analysis to a representative spectrum of industrially important reaction engineering problems.

Filling a longstanding gap for graduate courses in the field, Chemical Reaction Engineering: Beyond the Fundamentals covers basic concepts as well as complexities of chemical reaction engineering, including novel techniques for process intensification. The book is divided into three parts: Fundamentals Revisited, Building on Fundamentals, and Beyond the Fundamentals. Part I: Fundamentals Revisited reviews the salient features of an undergraduate course, introducing concepts essential to reactor design, such as mixing, unsteady-state operations, multiple steady states, and complex reactions.

Part II: Building on Fundamentals is devoted to "skill building," particularly in the area of catalysis and catalytic reactions. It covers chemical thermodynamics, emphasizing the thermodynamics of adsorption and complex reactions; the fundamentals of chemical kinetics, with special emphasis on microkinetic analysis; and heat and mass transfer effects in catalysis, including transport between phases, transfer across interfaces, and effects of external heat and mass transfer. It also contains a chapter that provides readers with tools for making accurate kinetic measurements and analyzing the data obtained.

Part III: Beyond the Fundamentals presents material not commonly covered in textbooks, addressing aspects of reactors involving more than one phase. It discusses solid catalyzed fluid-phase reactions in fixed-bed and fluidized-bed reactors, gas–solid noncatalytic reactions, reactions involving at least one liquid phase (gas–liquid and liquid–liquid), and multiphase reactions. This section also describes membrane-assisted reactor engineering, combo reactors, homogeneous catalysis, and phase-transfer catalysis. The final chapter provides a perspective on future trends in reaction engineering.