Prokaryotic diversity was investigated near the inlet and outlet of a plug-flow reactor. After analyzing 800 clones, 50 bacterial and 3 archaeal phylogenetic groups were defined. Clostridia (>92%) dominated among bacteria and Methanoculleus (>90%) among archaea. Significant changes in pH and volatile fatty acids did not invoke a major shift in the phylogenetic groups. We suggest that the enviro...

-A pilot plant study on propane catalytic combustion in a membrane reactor with separate reactant feeds is presented. The membrane consisted of a porous alumina tube activated by insertion into its pores of a Pt/7-A1203 catalyst. The role of reactants concentration and of the feed flow rates were studied in the transport-controlled operating regime, where a number of interesting properties of t...

Current methods for generating kinetic data can be categorized as either sampling steady-state conditions in flow or generating timeseries data in batch.[1] The latter method has proven particularly useful in identifying complex kinetic mechanisms.[2] Unfortunately, both of these techniques have significant limitations. While continuous flow experiments, especially in microreactors, have advant...

Performance efficiency in a Downflow Hanging Sponge (DHS) bioreactor is associated with the amount of time that a wastewater remains in the bioreactor. The bioreactor is considered as a plug flow reactor and its hydraulic residence time (HRT) depends on the void volume of packing material and the flow rate. In this study, hydraulic behavior of DHS bioreactor was investigated by using tracer met...

A two-stage methanotrophic bioreactor system was developed for remediation of water contaminated with TCE and other chlorinated, volatile, aliphatic hydrocarbons. The first stage of the reactor was a suspended-growth culture vessel using a bubbleless methane-transfer device. The second stage was a plug-flow bioreactor supplied with contaminated groundwater and cell suspension from the culture v...

Design, economics, and plantwide control of a glycerol-tert-butyl alcohol (TBA) etherification plant are presented. The reaction takes place in liquid phase, in a plug flow reactor, using Amberlyst 15 as a catalyst. The products' separation is achieved by two distillation columns where high-purity ethers are obtained and a section involving extractive distillation with 1,4-butanediol as solvent...

A systematic approach for on-the-fly mechanism reduction is proposed in this paper. The approach consists of element flux analysis and dynamic generation of reduced mechanisms during reactive flow computation. At each time step of the computation, a reduced mechanism is generated based on local conditions and no previous information or analysis is necessary. The approach is demonstrated in a pl...

The climatological impact and chemical characteristics of atmospheric aerosols remain very uncertain. The latest step in this field is the experimental use of UV-lit gas-phase tube reactors to simulate days to weeks of atmospheric photochemistry. These reactors have typically been modeled as plug-flow reactors. We have constructed a more detailed model to describe the new laminar-flow tube reac...

On the basis of the stochastic reactor model Partially Stirred Plug Flow Reactor (PaSPFR) a model is developed that accounts for soot and NOx formation in the distributed combustion regime. This is done by means of the joint composition probability density function (PDF). The composition vector consists of the species mass fraction in the gas phase, enthalpy, and four moments of the soot partic...