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Language: Korean

Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received September 15, 2005
Accepted March 1, 2006

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Prediction of concentration and temperature profiles for non-isothermal ethane cracking in a pipe reactor

Rajeev Kumar Garg Venkatesan Venkat Krishnan Vinod Kumar Srivastava^†

Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Hauz Khas, New Delhi-110016, India

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, July 2006, 23(4), 531-539(9), 10.1007/BF02706790

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Abstract

Thermal crackers are mostly modeled as plug flow systems, disregarding the lateral gradients present. In this paper, a 2-dimensional model has been established for ethane cracking in a thermal cracker in laminar flow, using a molecular mechanistic model for ethane cracking. The model, consisting of 9-coupled partial differential equations, is solved using the backward implicit numerical scheme. The resulting product distribution and temperature profiles are predicted throughout the reactor. The concentrations of acetylene and propylene show a maximum within the reactor. The effect of certain operational parameters - tube radius, wall temperature and mass flow rate - is also studied on these profiles. The parameters are varied in the range of 0.005-0.0125 m for tube radius, 1.25 kg/hr-2.5 kg/hr for mass flow rate and 850-1,050 °C for tube wall temperature. It is observed that an increase in wall temperature and an increase in tube radius or decrease in flow rate favours the conversion of ethane.

Keywords

Thermal Cracker Pipe Reactor Coupled Partial Differential Equations 2-Dimensional Modeling Operational Parameters

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