STATISTICAL STUDIES OF A REAL CONTINUOUS STIRRED TANK REACTOR (CSTR) BASED ON EXPERIMENTAL DATA

Reactor engineering is the most unique part of chemical engineering and its technology has gain tremendous applications in industry. Three ideal contacting patterns - batch, mixed flow and plug flow reactors are often studied and treated to make real reactors approach ideality as closely as possible. The three reacting patterns are easy to treat and simple to find their performance equation. Mixed flow reactor or Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR) is a type of reactor that is widely used mainly in food and beverages production, chemical neutralization, and other industries. It is preferable compared to other reactors, depending on its application for the ease of cleaning and maintenance and requires less labor cost. The objective of the study is to conduct statistical studies on a real CSTR. CSTR is often treated as 'ideal reactor', in which this statement is untrue because in real life perfect mixing in CSTR is hardly to be achieved because of dead zone creation and channeling. This study consists of two main parts; the first part is conducting experiments to obtain the reaction rate constant from the concentration data and tracer analysis. The second part is to do simulation and calculation on the experimental data obtained by using Microsoft Excel and MATLAB. The experiment conducted is to determine the reaction rate constant of the saponification reaction. The experiments on determining the RTD value are also conducted. There are two methods on determining it - step and pulse input. The experiment is conducted using the CSTR dynamics equipment and experimental data are analyzed. From the study, it was proved that the conversion in an ideal reactor is higher compared to the conversion in real reactors due to dead zone creation and bypassing. The conversion for the ideal reactor is 0.496, and for the real reactor modeled which are segregation model, maximum mixedness model and real CSTR with dead-space and bypass model are 0.479, 0.470 and 0.480 respectively