Transport Phenomena (book) | EPFL Graph Search

Transport Phenomena is the first textbook about transport phenomena. It is specifically designed for chemical engineering students. The first edition was published in 1960, two years after having been preliminarily published under the title Notes on Transport Phenomena based on mimeographed notes prepared for a chemical engineering course taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison during the academic year 1957-1958. The second edition was published in August 2001. A revised second edition was published in 2007. This text is often known simply as BSL after its authors' initials. History As the chemical engineering profession developed in the first half of the 20th century, the concept of "unit operations" arose as being needed in the education of undergraduate chemical engineers. The theories of mass, momentum and energy transfer were being taught at that time only to the extent necessary for a narrow range of applications. As chemical engineers began moving into a numbe

Extent-based Model Identification of Surface Catalytic Reaction Systems

Julien Léo Billeter, Dominique Bonvin, Diogo Filipe Mateus Rodrigues, Sriniketh Srinivasan

Identification of kinetic models and estimation of reaction and mass-transfer parameters is an important task for monitoring, control and optimization of industrial processes. A methodology called Extent-based Model Identification has been developed to separate the effects of reaction, mass transfer, and inlet and outlet flows for homogeneous and gas-liquid reaction systems. The decoupled effects, called extents, are used to decompose the model identification task incrementally into sub-problems of lower complexity, in which measured data are first transformed into extents and these extents are then modeled individually [1-3]. For the analysis of surface catalytic reaction systems, it is important to separate the coupled effects of transport phenomena and reactions. Therefore, the methodology of Extent-based Model Identification has been extended to gas-solid and gas-liquid-solid systems involving catalytic processes at the surface of a solid catalyst, described by Langmuir-Hinshelwood types of kinetic models. From measurements in the fluid and solid phases, the extent of each individual dynamic process is computed. A model is postulated for that process and the corresponding extent is simulated and compared with the computed extent. This procedure allows performing model identification and parameter estimation individually for each phenomenon and species (diffusion of substrates and products, adsorption of substrates, desorption of products and solid-phase reactions). [1] Bhatt et al., Ind. & Eng. Chem. Res., 2011, 50, 12960-12974 [2] Srinivasan et al., Chem. Eng. J., 2012, 208, 785-793 [3] Billeter et al., Anal. Chim. Acta, 2013, 767, 21-34

2014

Variant and Invariant States for Chemical Reaction Systems

Julien Léo Billeter, Dominique Bonvin, Diogo Filipe Mateus Rodrigues, Sriniketh Srinivasan

Models of open non-isothermal heterogeneous reaction systems can be quite complex as they include information regarding the reactions, the inlet and outlet flows, the transfer of species between phases and the transfer of energy. This paper builds on the concept of reaction variants and invariants and proposes a linear transformation that allows viewing a complex nonlinear reaction system via decoupled dynamic variables, each one associated with a particular phenomenon such as a single chemical reaction, a specific mass transfer or heat transfer. Three aspects are discussed, namely, (i) the decoupling of reaction and transport phenomena in open non-isothermal both homogeneous and heterogeneous reactors, (ii) the decoupling of spatially distributed systems such as tubular reactors, and (iii) the applicability of the decoupling transformation towards the analysis of complex reaction systems, in particular with respect to the analysis of measured data in the absence of a kinetic model.

Elsevier2015

Non-stationarity of solute travel time distribution observed in a controlled hydrologic transport volume

Enrico Bertuzzo, Gianluca Botter, Luca Carraro, Pierre Claude Jean Queloz, Andrea Rinaldo

Experimental data were collected over a year-long period in a transport experiment carried out within a controlled transport volume (represented by a 2m-deep, 1m-diameter lysimeter fitted with bottom drainage). The soil surface was shielded from natural rainfall, replaced by an artificial injection (Poisson process) at the daily timescale. Bottom drainage out-flows were continuously monitored with leakage tipping bucket and evapotranspiration (prompted by a willow tree growing within the system) was measured trough precision load cells, which also allow an accurate and continuous reading of the total water storage. Five artificial soluble tracers (species of fluorobenzoic acid, FBAs, mutually passive) were selected based on low-reactivity and low-retardation in our specific soil and used to individually mark five rainfall inputs of different amplitudes and occurring at various initial soil moisture conditions. Tracer discharge concentration and hydrologic fluxes measurements provide a direct method for the assessment of the bulk effects of transport on the (backward and forward) travel time distributions in the hydrological setting. The large discrepancies observed in terms of mass recovery in the discharge (supported by ex post FBAs quantification in the soil and in the vegetation) and tracer out-fluxes dynamics emphasized the dependence of the forward travel time on the various injection times and the stages experienced by the system during the migration of the pulse. Rescaling the measured travel time distribution by using the cumulative drainage volume as an independent variable instead of the time elapsed since the injection also fails to yield to stationary distributions, as it was argued by Niemi (1997). Our experimental results support earlier theoretical speculations centered on the key role of non-stationarity on the characterization of the properties of hydrologic flow and transport phenomena. A travel time based model, with all in- and out- hydrological fluxes imposed by the experimental measurements, could accurately reproduce the large divergences of the five tracers’ behavior and recovery, using adequate assumptions on the mixing processes occurring within the controlled volume, thus discrediting simple plug-flow (old-water first) and well-mixed processes which fail at this aim.

2014

Non-stationarity of solute travel time distribution observed in a controlled hydrologic transport volume

Enrico Bertuzzo, Gianluca Botter, Luca Carraro, Pierre Claude Jean Queloz, Andrea Rinaldo

2014