Reaction
Engineering
Research
Menu | Biochemical
| Food Engineering | Environmental
| Pharmaceuticals |
Polymer Science | Process
Systems Engineering | Reaction Engineering
| Separation Processes |
Doctoral
Program in Biotechnology |
Chemcial
Engineering Science |
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The
department has a comprehensive program in reaction
engineering and catalysis to help industry improve the
design, scale-up, and control of reactors. The increasing
pressure to reduce environmental impact, while maintaining
or improving cost-effectiveness has motivated the chemical,
pharmaceutical and energy industries to develop new and
more efficient chemical processes and reactor
configurations. In general, difficulties can be identified in two
areas: (1) Often kinetic and reactivity data are not known or
difficult to determine due to the enormous complexity of the
feedstock composition and the reaction pathways. (2)
Complex geometries of the reactors, and a strong coupling of
mass and heat transfer with the hydrodynamics and the
reactions require highly sophisticated simulation and
experimental tools. An area of active research is the
molecule-based modeling of complex reaction systems.
Determination of the molecular representation of the reactant
composition by using analytical techniques (NMR, H/C
SIMDIS) enables the development of structure/reactivity
correlations and kinetic data sets. Automated software is
used to allow a rapid determination of these reactivity data
even for highly complex reaction systems by exploiting Monte
Carlo methods and graph theory. Processes under
investigation are hydrocracking, thermal cracking, pyrolysis,
refining processes, and the production of synthetic fuels.
Another research area is the experimental investigation and
mathematical simulation of entire single and multiphase
reactor systems. Simulation tools especially developed for
large dynamical systems have to be applied, like front
tracking, direct linearization, domain decomposition,
subspace iteration, and special preconditioning procedures,
which are combined in parallelized codes. Experimental tools
have been implemented to characterize both hydrodynamics
and reactions. These include particle-imaging velocimetry,
full field laser induced fluorescence, laser induced particle
concentration measurement, and UV spectrophotometry.
Examples are catalytic destruction of VOCs, gasification
processes in fluidized beds, hydrogen production, fluid
catalytic cracking, polymerization reactors and incineration of
solid waste.
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