One of the principle tasks required of chemical engineers is reactor design. Reactors have traditionally been fairly large, allowing certain simplifying assumptions to be used in their design, such as perfect mixing in tank reactors and plug flow in tubular reactors.
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The small size of microchemical reactors does not allow these
conditions to be readily assumed, as the low Reynolds numbers inherent
in microreactor conditions mean that these devices often operate in the
laminar regime.
In microreactors, the effect of transport phenomena cannot be considered to be uniform in 2 or 3 dimensions as is usually the case in traditional reactor design. We were asked to investigate the effects of transport phenomena on the oxidation of ammonia in a microreactor. How we did so is the subject of the following pages.
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