Numerical Simulation Of High-Dimensional Model Of Periodic Flow Reversal Reactors

The flow reversal technique is a new important technique in chemical industry which began to be developed in 1980s. It can greatly improve behavior of reactors for some important reaction systems~ [1-3], specially for exothermic reaction systems with gases of low concentration. The reactors can display steep temperature and concentration fronts moving through the reactor bed slowly. Their mathematical models are usually nonlinear reaction-convection-diffusion PDE system. In this paper, numerical algorithms for the high dimension models of the reactors are studied and applied to simulate catalytic oxidation process of sulphur dioxide of low concentration in an adiabatic fixed-bed reactor with periodic flow reversal. The numerical results are satisfactory.First, for radially symmetrical three-dimensional model of round tubular fixed-bed reactor with flow reversal and heat exchange along the tubular wall, we develop a new computational scheme by ADI method...