Chemical Reaction Engineering Handbook: Kinetics, Catalysis, Reactor Design, and Transport in Ideal and Non-Ideal Systems

You can follow a reactor derivation line by line in a lecture and still stall when the real problem arrives: a reaction, a page of operating data, and no template to copy.
Reaction engineering is usually learned as a stack of formulas — one for the batch vessel, one for the stirred tank, one for the tube. The stack holds up until the problem changes, and in practice it always changes. The vessel is no longer isothermal, and the temperature climbs as the reaction proceeds. Two reactions compete for the same reactant, so converting more of it yields less of what you actually want. A catalyst pellet is thick enough that its interior never sees the bulk concentration, and the activation energy you measure is roughly half the true one. The flow through the vessel is nothing like the ideal pattern the equations quietly assume. A remembered formula is then worse than no formula, because it answers the wrong question confidently. What is missing is not more equations. It is the judgment to decide which balance governs, which rate expression applies, and which assumptions are still safe.

This handbook was written to close that gap. Across fifteen chapters it develops chemical reaction engineering as one connected argument rather than a reference list, carrying the reader from the definition of a reaction rate to the analysis, design, and scale-up of the reactors in which real reactions are carried out. Theory is built from stated assumptions in explanatory prose, every equation is presented with its variables and units defined, and each chapter rests on the one before it.
Inside this handbook you will:
• Derive the design equation of every ideal reactor from a single general mole balance, instead of memorising four unrelated formulas.
• Extract a rate law from laboratory data by integral, differential, initial-rate, and fractional-life methods, and recognise where each one breaks down.
• Size a batch vessel including its charging, heating, discharge, and cleaning time, and work out how many batches a day it will actually deliver.
• Choose an operating temperature and a feed strategy that push a competing reaction toward the product you want, using differences in reaction order and activation energy as the two independent levers.
• Recognise when a cooled exothermic reactor has more than one steady state, judge which are stable, and identify the points at which it will ignite or extinguish.
• Test a measured catalytic rate for pore-diffusion limitation, then confirm the controlling regime by varying particle size and fluid velocity.
• Turn a tracer curve into a mean, a variance, and a working model of the vessel, then bracket the conversion between two limiting mixing assumptions.

Coverage runs from mole balances and design equations for batch, stirred-tank, plug-flow, and packed-bed reactors, through stoichiometry and variable-density gas systems, rate laws and activation energy, space time and space velocity, reactors in series, parallel, and recycle, and the analysis of rate data — then on to selectivity and yield, energy balances and interstage cooling, multiple steady states and thermal runaway, adsorption and catalyst deactivation, pore diffusion and the effectiveness factor, residence-time distributions, and gas–liquid, slurry, trickle-bed, fluidised-bed, membrane, and biological reactors.

It is written for chemical engineering students meeting kinetics and reactor design for the first time, for graduate students who want the non-ideal and multiphase material in one place, and for practising process and plant engineers who need a dependable desk reference. Chemical thermodynamics is assumed; the mathematics asks for calculus and nothing heavier.

Open the book at the first chapter and begin building the judgment to read an unfamiliar reactor problem, decide which balances and rate expressions govern it, and carry the analysis through to a design you can defend.