A reactor sized with textbook methods for a single, well-behaved reaction rarely behaves the same way once it is built, fed with a real feedstock, and asked to run for months on end.
An engineer who has completed a first course in reaction engineering can size an ideal batch, plug-flow, or stirred-tank reactor for one clean reaction — but real reacting systems rarely stay that simple. Feedstocks react along more than one pathway at once, so selectivity becomes the real design question. Real vessels do not mix perfectly. Real catalysts lose activity over months of service. Real exothermic systems can run away if their thermal behavior is not understood in advance. An introductory course does not cover any of this, and it is exactly where good designs go wrong.
This advanced, sixteen-chapter reference works through that gap directly, developing every major design method from its governing assumptions and first principles, carrying each one through a complete, unit-tracked worked example, and testing it again in independent end-of-chapter practice problems. Complete solutions to every practice problem are collected in one consolidated section, in chapter and problem-number order, immediately before the index.
Readers will be able to:
- Analyze multiple and competing reaction networks to control selectivity and yield, not just overall conversion.
- Diagnose nonideal flow with residence-time-distribution methods and use tracer data to predict real reactor conversion.
- Design fixed-bed, fluidized-bed, and multiphase reactors — including trickle-bed and slurry configurations — around real hydrodynamics and mass-transfer limits.
- Track catalyst structure, synthesis, characterization, and deactivation through to a realistic regeneration or replacement decision.
- Model reactors at the right level of a hierarchy, from lumped parameters through computational-fluid-dynamics-based simulation, and couple that model to heat- and mass-transfer effects.
- Recognize the thermal-stability boundary that separates a controlled exothermic reactor from a runaway one, and apply a structured reactive-hazard evaluation and layers-of-protection approach.
- Move from a fitted kinetic parameter to a defensible, optimized design decision, and scale that decision up using methods illustrated with complete industrial reactor case studies.
Coverage extends beyond classical gas- and liquid-phase systems into biochemical, enzymatic, and polymerization reaction engineering, giving practicing engineers and graduate students a single, consistently notated reference — complete with a master notation appendix, standard property tables, and a chapter-by-chapter glossary — rather than a shelf of narrower, disconnected texts.
Who this book is for: practicing process and chemical engineers who design, troubleshoot, or scale up reactors, and graduate students who have completed an introductory reaction-engineering course and material/energy balance sequence and are ready for the complexity that idealized coursework leaves out. Catalysis researchers and process-safety engineers will also find its reasoning-first approach directly useful.
Get your copy and start building a clearer, more defensible approach to the reactor design problems idealized courses leave out.
