ABSTRACT
Applications .............................................................................................. 570 16.5 Some Engineering and Modeling Issues ................................................................. 572 16.6 Conclusions............................................................................................................. 574 References ......................................................................................................................... 575
The growing need of energy and space savings has forced chemical engineers to develop new reactors capable of carrying out, besides chemical reactions, other functions such as separation, heat exchange, momentum transfer, secondary reactions, etc. Agar and Ruppel [1] and Westerterp [2] reviewed a number of these apparatuses, calling them multifunctional reactors. Typical members of this class are membrane reactors (combining a catalytically promoted reaction and a separation allowed by the membrane itself; see Chapters 17 and 18), reactive distillation columns (where separation between reactants and products is accomplished by distillation [3,4]; see Chapter 15), and catalytic reactors with periodic flow reversal (in which higher than adiabatic temperatures can be kept in the central part of the reactors thus allowing complete combustion of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) [5]).
