Page 16 - The engineering of chemical reactions

xvi Preface

contains less kinetics every year, and we also have difficulty finding a chemical kinetics text
that covers the material we need (catalysis, enzymes, polymerization, multiple reactions,
combustion) in the chemical engineering kinetics course.
Consequently, while I jump into continuous reactors in Chapter 3, I have tried to
cover essentially all of conventional chemical kinetics in this book. I have tried to include
all the kinetics material in any of the chemical kinetics texts designed for undergraduates,
but these are placed within and at the end of chapters throughout the book. The descriptions
of reactions and kinetics in Chapter 2 do not assume any previous exposure to chemical
kinetics. The simplification of complex reactions (pseudosteady-state and equilibrium step
approximations) are covered in Chapter 4, as are theories of unimolecular and bimolecular
reactions. I mention the need for statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics in inter-
preting reaction rates but do not go into state-to-state dynamics of reactions. The kinetics
with catalysts (Chapter 7), solids (Chapter 9), combustion (Chapter lo), polymerization
(Chapter ll), and reactions between phases (Chapter 12) are all given sufficient treatment
that their rate expressions can be justified and used in the appropriate reactor mass balances.
I suggest that we may need to be able to teach all of chemical kinetics within
chemical engineering and that the integration of chemical kinetics within chemical reaction
engineering may have pedagogical value. I hope that these subjects can be covered using this
text in any combination of courses and that, if students have had previous kinetics courses,
this material can be skipped in this book. However, chemistry courses and texts give so
little and such uneven treatment of topics such as catalytic and polymerization kinetics that
reactors involving them cannot be covered without considering their kinetics.
Most texts strive to be encyclopedias of a subject from which the instructor takes a
small fraction in a course and that are to serve as a future reference when a student later
needs to learn in detail about a specific topic. This is emphatically not the intent of this text.
First, it seems impossible to encompass all of chemical reaction engineering with less than a
Kirk-Othmer encyclopedia. Second, the student needs to see the logical flow of the subject
in an introductory course and not become bogged down in details. Therefore, we attempt to
write a text that is short enough that a student can read all of it and an instructor can cover
most of it in one course. This demands that the text and the problems focus carefully. The
obvious pitfall is that short can become superficial, and the readers and users will decide
that difference.
Many people assisted in the writing of this book. Marylin Huff taught from several
versions of the manuscript at Minnesota and at Delaware and gave considerable help. John
Falconer and Mark Barteau added many suggestions. All of my graduate students have been
forced to work problems, find data and references, and confirm or correct derivations. Most
important, my wife Sherry has been extremely patient about my many evenings spent at
the Powerbook.