In two earlier articles, we provided sufficient conditions on (mass action) reaction network structure for the preclusion of multiple positive steady states in the context of what chemical engineers call the continuous flow stirred tank reactor. In such reactors, all species are deemed to be present in the effluent stream, a fact which played a strong role in the proofs. When certain species ar...

Spatially resolved analysis of the composition of the gas-phase during chemical vapor deposition depends on an effective sampling apparatus. In the present work, a novel in-situ sampling and cooling apparatus was presented, which is connected directly to an online GC/MS. Simulations of the temperature distribution in the cooling apparatus show that sample gas can be cooled down to 600 K in shor...

The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique was employed to optimize an industrial chemical process characterized by being difficult to be optimized by conventional methods. The chemical process is a three phase catalytic slurry reactor in which the reaction of the hydrogenation of o-cresol producing 2-methyl-cyclohexanol is carried out. The process was represented by a multivariable non-li...

Most conventional chemical vapor deposition (CVD) systems do not have the spatial actuation and sensing capabilities necessary to control deposition uniformity, or to intentionally induce nonuniform deposition patterns for single-wafer combinatorial CVD experiments. In an effort to address this limitation, a novel CVD reactor system has been developed that can explicitly control the spatial pro...

A simple model and results for the decomposition of pulverized cellulosic biomass within a non-oxidizing gas of transient temperature and pressure is presented. This model is used to predict the performance of a novel thermo-chemical biomass conversion scheme termed the reciprocating biomass conversion reactor (RBCR). Calculations indicate that complete thermo-chemical conversion can be complet...

Rapid continuous thermal control of chemical reactions such as those for chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of nanotubes and nanowires cannot be studied using traditional reactors such as tube furnaces, which have large thermal masses. We present the design, modeling, and verification of a simple, low-cost reactor based on resistive heating of a suspended silicon platform. This system achie...

BACKGROUND In order to meet the International Maritime Organization (IMO) objectives, the main purpose of this study was using the cheap and practical wastewater treatment system for low-strength bilge water of Caspian Sea ships; therefore, the low-strength bilge water of the Caspian Sea ships has been treated by up-flow anaerobic sludge fixed film (UASFF) reactor at the ambient temperature. ...

Conventional oil sewage treatment methods can achieve satisfactory removal efficiency, but energy consumption problems during the process of oil sewage treatment are worth attention. The integration of a constructed wetland reactor and a microbial fuel cell reactor (CW-MFC) to treat oil-contaminated wastewater, compared with a microbial fuel cell reactor (MFC) alone and a constructed wetland re...

Microbial reduction of soluble bivalent mercury to its less toxic elemental metallic form was performed using mercury-resistant Bacillus cereus (JUBT1) isolated from the sludge of chloralkali industries. A lab-scale 1 m long and 0.05 m diameter packed bed biofilm reactor was designed to remove mercuric ions (Hg) using isolated bacterial consortium. The bioreactor was continuously fed with steri...

This paper describes the application of a model predictive controller to the problem of batch reactor temperature control. Although a great deal of work has been done to improve reactor throughput using batch sequence control, the control of the actual reactor temperature remains a difficult problem for many operators of these processes. Temperature control is important as many chemical reactio...