METTLER TOLEDO
 

Practical Mixing Concepts for Scale-up for RC1 Reactors

Reinaldo M. Machado, Air Products and Chemicals Inc., Allentown, PA, USA.
    
At the core of the scale-up challenge is anticipating how mixing at various scales influence a chemical process. The time scales for processes at different scales make it virtually impossible to operate both a large and small process with the identical conditions of mixing, phase distribution, mass and heat transfer. Typically only a few critical physical/chemical process steps control the overall complex chemical process. Determining which of these process steps are controlling and then operating in such a way to make only one of those process steps controlling, aids in making the scale-up effort successful. This often requires operating a laboratory reactor in a manner that appears on the surface to be very different than the plant reactor. Our discussion describes how process time constants can be estimated and how mixing concepts can be incorporated in the design and analysis of experiments. Short-cut experimental techniques will be described and straight forward measurements with the RC1 will be illustrated.
     
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