Process / pipelineReactor Engineering
PFR Model
The PFR (Plug Flow Reactor) model describes the behavior of a tubular reactor in which fluid elements move through as distinct plugs with no axial mixing. Fluid at the inlet is freshly unreacted; as it travels downstream, reactions progress. This idealized model, formalized by Octave Levenspiel alongside CSTR theory, is the opposite extreme: while CSTRs are fully mixed, PFRs have no axial mixing. In practice, PFRs achieve higher conversion than CSTRs for the same residence time and are widely used in the chemical and petroleum industries.
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Sources
- Levenspiel, O. (1999). Chemical Reaction Engineering (3rd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 978-0-471-25424-9
- Fogler, H. S. (2016). Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering (5th ed.). Pearson. ISBN: 978-0-13-388928-8
- Schmidt, L. D. (2005). The Engineering of Chemical Reactions (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0-195-10490-0