Mathematical Model of Catalytic Chemical Reactor

Abstract

This study concerns mathematical modeling, analyzing and simulation aspect of a catalytic reaction kinetics. The paper has the form a feasibility study, and is not referring to actual industrial chemical reactors. The catalytic reaction equations are modeled in the form of non-linear ordinary differential equations. These equations are composed of kinetic parameters such as kinetic rate constants, concentration of substances and the initial concentrations. The modeling consists of establishing the model and discuss variations and simplifications by applying generic modeling tools like scaling, perturbation analysis and numerical experiments. Numerical simulations help corroborate theoretical results. The analysis here considers a revised model with permanent poisoning of the catalyst with no reversibility. To show that the numerical solution and the perturbation solution give approximate or identical results and to observe the actual functional behavior over the interval of interest, the equations of solutions are implemented, evaluated, and plotted using Matlab^TM. The perturbation solutions are compared to numerical solutions obtained by the Matlab^TM ODE solver ODE45.

Key Words: Chemical reactor, Modeling, Scaling, Regular and Singular perturbation, Numerical experiments.