Safe and productive operation of homogeneous semibatch reactors. I. Development of a general procedure

In this work, a procedure based on the use of boundary and temperature diagrams for selecting safe and productive operating conditions of homogeneous semibatch reactors is presented and the influence of the reaction kinetics on the shape and extension of such diagrams is discussed. It has been found that using correlations developed for (1,1) reaction order kinetics can lead to both unsafe or not necessary low production operating conditions, especially with reference to the reaction order of the dosed coreactant. Moreover, the dependence of the shape and extension of such diagrams on the chemical kinetics has been found to be completely different when homogeneous or heterogeneous reacting systems are considered. A number of ready-to-use boundary and temperature diagrams is presented, together with some rules of thumb for their use, allowing for the easy selection of safe and productive operating conditions for homogeneous semibatch reactors.