DESIGN OF A REAL CSTR BASED ON SAPONIFICATION AND RESIDENCE TIME DISTRIBUTION EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES

The Chemical Reactor Engineering has proven to be an important part of chemical engineering; it provides expertise to the industrial sector on Reactor Engineering and Chemical Processes, and concentrates on the development of novel reactor modelling and optimization of chemical processes. Its technology has gain tremendous applications in industry. Three ideal contacting patterns are, batch, mixed flow and plug flow reactors are often studied and treated to make real reactors approach ideality as closely as possible. Thethree reacting patterns are easyto treat and simple to find their performance equation. Mixed flow reactor or Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR) is a type of reactor that is widely used mainly in food and beverages production, chemical neutralization, and other industries. It is preferable compared to other types of reactors, depending on its application for the ease of cleaning, maintenance and requires less labor cost. Thisproject requires the student to analysis the idealandthe real behaviour of a methanol and ethanol model in a Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor. Thus, the research project illustrates the overall performance of a CSTR in terms of Reactor's conversion, residence time distribution and yield. Thus, the main objective of this research project is to conduct an empirical and analytical studyon a real and ideal behaviour of a CSTR,which is often treated as an ideal reactor. However, the theoretical principle of an ideal and a perfect mixing in CSTR is hardly achieved in any industrial application due to some limitations such as dead zone creation and channeling. Thus, this study consists of three main parts as illustrated below; 1. Derivation of mathematical equation such as rate of reaction for the Saponification reaction 2. Determination of reaction rate constant from the concentration data and tracer analysis (experimental study). 3. Simulation and calculation on the experimental data obtained by using Microsoft Excel and FEMLAB. Three main experiments are conducted, in which the first experiment is to determine the reaction rate constant of reaction, which is the saponification reaction. Secondly, to determine the effect of an adequate mixing on reaction rate constant and the third being the determination of the RTD value, which is determined by either step change input and pulse input. The RTD experiment is conducted using the CSTR dynamics, tank in series and the CSTR with hot water circulation equipment and experimental data are analyzed, the three equipments are used separately and their RTD values are compared just to further understand their performance and responds in the saponification process. Finally, the study illustrated that the conversion in a real reactor is higher comparatively due to dead zone creation and bypassing. The conversions for the ideal reactor is 43 % for ethanol synthesis and 52 % for methanol synthesis, and for the real reactor modeled are as shown in table 4. FEMLAB is used to model and analysis the mechanism of ethanol and methanol production in a CSTR under the ideal and real operating conditions. Temperature and concentration profile of the reactant generated by the FEMLAB modeling package is monitored, and conversion and yield of ethanol and methanol obtained from conducting an experiment is studied and the results are used for comparison with previous research. The concentration profile shows that the concentration of the reactant decreases from 0.05mole/L to 0.0484 mole/L, forming the desired product with respect to the residence time distribution of the reactant inside the reactor. While the temperature profile showing the temperature increases at the start of the reaction to show that this is an exothermic reaction. But when reactant is consuming gradually, the temperature started to decrease indicating that there is not enough reactant to produce the desired product.