Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering, 6th Edition

11. Nonisothermal Reactor Design: The Steady-State Energy Balance and Adiabatic PFR Applications

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

—Harry S Truman

Overview. Because most reactions are not carried out isothermally, we now focus our attention on heat effects in chemical reactors. The basic CRE algorithm of mole balance, rate law, stoichiometry, combine, and evaluate used in Chapters 1–10 for isothermal reactor design is still valid for the design of nonisothermal reactors and we only need to add one more step, the energy balance to solve nonisothermal problems. The major difference lies in the method of evaluating the combined mole balances, rate law, and stoichiometry when temperature varies along the length of a PFR or when ...