ARTICLE:

• THE EFFECT OF AN ENERGETIC CHEMICAL REACTION ON CONVECTIVE HEAT TRANSFER  download article

S. W. Churchill
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

B. Yu
China University of Petroleum, Beijing, China

ABSTRACT

Owing to the exponential dependence of the rate constant for most chemical reactions on temperature, heat transfer through the wall of a tubular chemical reactor is usually necessary to control the rate of reaction, and in particular to avoid the two possible extremes of runaway and premature quenching. In previous work, we carried out numerical solutions for representative cases of reaction with heat transfer, and had some success in predicting the chemical conversion by deriving asymptotic solutions to serve as a structure for correlation.
In the current work, the converse effect, that is the dependence of the rate of convective heat transfer on an energetic chemical reaction, an effect that has previously received only fragmentary attention, has been investigated numerically and coherently. The combination of the thermicity (the fractional increase in temperature due to the reaction) and of uniform heating at the wall is shown to produce chaotic variations of as much as an order of magnitude in the Nusselt number. A theoretically based expression has been devised for the prediction of this behavior.

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