PREFACE

This book is an outgrowth of an earlier book, Chemical Reactor Design, John

Wiley & Sons, 1987. The title is dierent and reects a new emphasis on optimi-
zation and particularly on scaleup, a topic rarely covered in undergraduate or
graduate education but of paramount importance to many practicing engineers.
The treatment of biochemical and polymer reaction engineering is also more
extensive than normal.
Practitioners are the primary audience for the new book. Here, in one spot,
you will nd a reasonably comprehensive treatment of reactor design, optimiza-
tion and scaleup. Spend a few minutes becoming comfortable with the notation
(anyone bothering to read a preface obviously has the inclination), and you will
nd practical answers to many design problems.
The book is also useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in chemical
engineering. Some faults of the old book have been eliminated. One fault was its
level of diculty. It was too hard for undergraduates at most U.S. universities.
The new book is better. Known rough spots have been smoothed, and it is easier
to skip advanced material without loss of continuity. However, the new book
remains terse and somewhat more advanced in its level of treatment than is
the current U.S. standard. Its goal as a text is not to train students in the appli-
cation of existing solutions but to educate them for the solution of new pro-
blems. Thus, the reader should be prepared to work out the details of some
examples rather than expect a complete solution.
There is a continuing emphasis on numerical solutions. Numerical solutions
are needed for most practical problems in chemical reactor design, but sophisti-
cated numerical techniques are rarely necessary given the speed of modern com-
puters. The goal is to make the techniques understandable and easily accessible
and to allow continued focus on the chemistry and physics of the problem.
Computational elegance and eciency are gladly sacriced for simplicity.
Too many engineers are completely in the dark when faced with variable
physical properties, and tend to assume them away without full knowledge
of whether the eects are important. They are often unimportant, but a real
design problemas opposed to an undergraduate exercise or preliminary pro-
cess synthesisdeserves careful assembly of data and a rigorous solution.
Thus, the book gives simple but general techniques for dealing with varying
physical properties in CSTRs and PFRs. Random searches are used for optimi-
zation and least-squares analysis. These are appallingly inecient but mar-
velously robust and easy to implement. The method of lines is used for
solving the partial dierential equations that govern real tubular reactors and
packed beds. This technique is adequate for most problems in reactor design.
xiii
No CD ROM is supplied with the book. Many of the numerical problems can
be solved with canned ODE and PDE solvers, but most of the solutions are quite
simple to code. Creative engineers must occasionally write their own code to
solve engineering problems. Due to their varied nature, the solutions require
use of a general-purpose language rather than a specic program. Computa-
tional examples in the book are illustrated using Basic. This choice was made
because Basic is indeed basic enough that it can be sight-read by anyone already
familiar with another general-purpose language and because the ubiquitous
spreadsheet, Excel, uses Basic macros. Excel provides input/output, plotting,
and formatting routines as part of its structure so that coding eorts can be
concentrated on the actual calculations. This makes it particularly well suited
for students who have not yet become comfortable with another language.
Those who prefer another language such as C or Fortran or a mathematical
programming system such as Mathematica, Maple, Mathcad, or Matlab
should be able to translate quite easily.
I continue with a few eccentricities in notation, using a, b, c, . . . to denote
molar concentrations of components A, B, C, . . . . I have tried to avoid acro-
nyms and other abbreviations unless the usage is common and there is a true
economy of syllables. Equations are numbered when the results are referenced
or the equations are important enough to deserve some emphasis. The problems
at the back of each chapter are generally arranged to follow the ow of the text
rather than level of diculty. Thus, some low-numbered problems can be fairly
dicult.
Bruce Nauman
Troy, New York
xiv PREFACE