ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the fundamentals of heat transfer and energy exchange in chemically reacting flows. Chemically reacting flows are characterized by chemical changes of reactants that yield one or more products in solid, liquid, and/or gas phases. These reactions often consist of a sequence of individual sub-steps, called elementary reactions, which occur at a characteristic reaction rate, temperature, and chemical concentration. In chemical reaction engineering, two common types of reactors are batch and continuous reactors. A batch reactor is a tank with a mixer and heating or cooling system. Continuous reactors have inflow and outflow streams that typically bring in reactants and move the resulting products through an exit stream. An exothermic reactor releases heat and therefore requires a cooling system to maintain a uniform temperature, whereas an endothermic reactor requires heat input to drive the chemical reaction. The residence time is an important parameter for incoming reactants in continuous reactors.
