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Chemical Engineering and Thermodynamics

Winter term

Taught by Juan Manuel Paz García

Optimization of chemical reactors, filtration equipment, mixers and other related processes is easily performed with the Chemical Reaction Engineering Module. This module is useful for engineers and scientists who work, for example, in chemical, process, power, pharmaceutical, polymer and food industries, etc.

The Chemical Reaction Engineering Module contains tools to simulate matter transport and heat transfer together with arbitrary chemical kinetics in all kinds of environments: gases, liquids, porous media, on surfaces and within solid phases, or combinations of all of them. It provides physical interfaces to define material transport in dilute and concentrated solutions or mixtures through convection, diffusion and ionic electromigration of an arbitrary number of chemical species. The physics interface for defining chemical reactions is straightforward since chemical formulas and equations are written essentially as we would write them on paper.

This course comprises chemical reaction engineering and thermodynamics. We list and describe in detail the physics interfaces corresponding to simulation in the field of chemical reaction engineering: the Reaction Engineering interface and the Chemistry interface. The description will be accompanied by the theoretical foundations on which each simulation interface is based, including the fundamental concepts, methods and tools. We also discuss at this point the different multiphysics couplings that can appear in combination with chemical reaction kinetics. In the study of chemical reactions, it is essential to specify the thermodynamic properties, both thermal and transport, of the species involved in the reactions themselves. In this section, we explain in detail the existing tools to make explicit the thermodynamic properties and models necessary to complete the simulation of the reaction engineering model.

    • Introduction to chemical reaction engineering.
    • Fundamental concepts, methods and tools for modeling chemical reactions.
    • The chemical reaction engineering interface.
    • Generation of space-dependent models.
    • The chemistry interface.
    • Theoretical foundations and thermodynamic models.
    • Thermodynamic properties.

Image made using the COMSOL Multiphysics® software and provided by courtesy of COMSOL.