A model of porous catalyst accounting for incipiently non-isothermal effects

An approximate model accounting for incipiently non-isothermal effects is derived from a well-known model of porous catalyst for appropriate, realistic limiting values of the parameters. In this limit, the original model is a singularly perturbed, m-D reaction-diffusion system, and the approximate modal is given by the m-D heat equation with nonlinear boundary condition, coupled with infinitely many (if m greater than or equal to 2) 1-D semilinear parabolic equations, one for each point of the boundary of the spatial domain. Some limiting cases are still considered in the approximate model that lead to Further simplifications. (C) 1999 Academic Press.