Didactic use of continuous stirred reactors for determining heterogeneous reaction kinetics

Abstract

The modeling, construction and use of a continuous stirred tank reactor for obtaining experimental data of heterogeneous reaction rates are described. Firstly, by means of analyses of material balances it is emphasized how the capacity of this reactor type for the steadiness operation is advantageous for studying heterogeneous catalytic systems. Consequently, an experimental practice for determining global rate equations from intrinsic equations obtained by the limiting step method is proposed. It was employed a continuous stirred tank reactor whose construction and operation are simple and described in detail. The sucrose hydrolysis is implemented as model reaction, at 60 °C and 1 atm, being of easy monitoring. The reaction is catalyzed by an acid resin (Amberlite 120 H, total exchange capacity ≥ 1.80 eq/L). The experiment shows an application of the limiting step method for obtaining global reaction rate equations; it is a didactic tool for reinforcing the practical learning in courses of heterogeneous reaction engineering.