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Optimal design of an ammonia reactor
Authors

Thomas F. Edgar
Organization: University of Texas at Austin
Department: Department of Chemical Engineering
Housam Binous
Organization: KFUPM
Department: Chemical Engineering
URL: http://sites.google.com/site/homepageofdrhousambinous/
Revision date

2006-02-07
Description

The notebook computes the temperature and concentration profiles of the NH3 synthesis reactor based on the Haber process. The governing equations are derived (and corrected) from on a paper by Murase et al., Optimal Thermal Design of an Auto-thermal Ammonia Synthesis Reactor, Ind. Eng. Chem. Des. Dev., 9:504 (1970) and the excellent book by Edgar et al., Optimization of chemical processes, second edition, McGrawHill, 2001. The objective function, given in Edgar and co-authors’ book, is used in order to determine the optimum rector length. This objective function is based on the difference between the values of the product gas and the feed gas as well as the amortization of the reactor capital cost.
Subjects

*Applied Mathematics > Optimization
*Engineering > Chemical Engineering
*Science > Chemistry
Keywords

Ammonia rector, optimization, FindMaximum, ODEs, NDSolve, Temkin and Pyzhev rate expression, ammonia synthesis, Haber process
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edgar_page491b.nb (53.8 KB) - Mathematica Notebook [for Mathematica 5.2]