Trajectory analysis of nonisothermal tubular reactor nonlinear models

The existence and uniqueness of the state trajectories (temperature and reactant concentration) are analyzed for nonisothermal plug flow and axial dispersion tubular reactor models. It is mainly shown that these trajectories exist on the whole (nonnegative real) time axis and the set of all physically feasible state values is invariant under the dynamics equations. The main nonlinearity in the model originates from the Arrhenius-type kinetics term in the model equations. The analysis essentially uses Lipschitz and dissipativity properties of the nonlinear operator involved in the dynamics and the concept of state trajectory positivity. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved