THE DYNAMICS OF REVERSE FLOW CHROMATOGRAPHIC REACTORS WITH SIDE STREAM FEED

Abstract

A combination of analytical and numerical techniques is used to study the dynamics of a chromatographic reactor with flow reversal and side stream feed. We show that effective operation of such a reactor depends upon the existence of sharp slowly moving fronts and that it can be much more efficient than an equivalent continuous flow reactor. The numerical difficulties associated with the sharp fronts can either be overcome by integrating the equilibrium equations or by using a hierarchical adaptive j;rid on the full equations. The flow in the reactor is assumed to be uniform, but our methods can readily b; extended to deal with more complicated cases.