Residence Time Distribution Determination of a Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor using Computational Fluid Dynamics and its Application on the Mathematical Modeling of Styrene Polymerization

GAMBA IGNACIO; MARQUEZ DAMIAN, SANTIAGO; ESTENOZ DIANA; STORTI MARIO; NIGRO NORBERTO; KNOEPPEL DAVID

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL REACTOR ENGINEERING

BERKELEY ELECTRONIC PRESS

Lugar: Ontario; Año: 2012 vol. 10 p. 1515 - 1542

1542-6580

The continuous operation of a stirred tank reactor for styrene polymerizationwas modeled. The proposed approach consists of an iterative procedure betweentwo modules that considers the fluid-dynamics and kinetics respectively. The ki-netic module considers a complex kinetic mechanism and is used to predict thetime evolution of global variables, such as conversion and species concentrations,physicochemical properties and molecular structure characteristics of the finalproduct. In order to obtain a 3D representation of the flow field, the simulationof the hydrodynamics of the reactor was carried out with the aid of a commercialcomputational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package. Because CFD is capableto predict the complete velocity distribution in a tank, it provided a good alterna-tive to carry out residence time distribution (RTD) studies. It was found that thestimulus-response tracer method is reasonably accurate to obtain a complete RTDcompared to the particle tracking method. The obtained RTD results showed agood agreement when validated with experimental data and literature information.From the estimates of the kinetic module and the RTD predictions, a statisticalcalculus allows the determination of the average properties at the reactor outlet.The convergence of the iterative procedure was tested and reasonable predictionswere achieved for an industrial reactor.