STABILITY OF STEADY REGIMES IN AN ISOTHERMAL CHEMICAL FLOW REACTOR.

One of the fundamental problems in the theory of chemical reactors is the determination of the number of steady regimes and their stability. The stability of a steady regime is usually established from an analysis of the behavior of small perturbations. The corresponding linear boundary-value problem for perturbations has been studied mainly in the limiting cases of ideal mixing and ideal displacement. When account was taken of longitudinal mixing, the only criteria obtained were ones which imposed fairly severe restrictions on the parameters. In the present study numerical analysis is used in order to investigate the stability of steady concentration distributions in an isothermal chemical flow reactor with longitudinal mixing in the case of a single chemical reaction. The eigenvalues were obtained for the Sturm-Liouville problem, which fully characterize the stability for several laws of variation of the chemical reaction rate as a function of the concentration.