Set Up, Solve Sets of Material and Energy Balance

By DE Editors

The COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab  from COMSOL Inc. (Burlington, MA) enables you to set up, simulate, and solve chemical processes involving many reactants with continually changing concentrations in a matter of minutes. COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab provides a streamlined work methodology that makes the investigating the influence of different assumptions and reaction mechanisms in detailed kinetic studies efficient.

The COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab’s graphical user interface is key to its efficiency characteristic. Through the GUI, you describe your chemical-engineering problems in a straightforward manner: You simply enter the chemical-reaction formulae as you would write them on paper. The software then sets up the corresponding kinetics, material, and energy balances using the mass-action law or user-defined expressions. Further, during this process, you can have the COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab calculate the thermodynamic and transport properties of reacting mixtures. Ultimately, your computations produce a plot or tabular output of the system behavior, often reactant composition or temperature as a function of time.

The COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab features a state-of-the-art solver known as DASPK, developed by Professor Linda Petzold of the University of California, Santa Barbara. It also ships with COMSOL Script, a command-line interpreted language that provides 500 commands for matrix and numeric computations as well as visualization. The latter also lets you couple multiple reactor models developed with the COMCOL Reaction Engineering Lab so that you can simulate a complex process or production line.

Running as a standalone package, COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab’s equation solver handles chemical reactions in a perfectly mixed reacting system or in a tubular reactor with variations in one space variable. COMCOL Reaction Engineering Lab seamlessly integrates with the company’s flagship product COMSOL Multiphysics and its Chemical Engineering Module. This combination lets you simulate reactors with an arbitrary geometry and spatial variations in concentration and temperature in 1D, 2D, or 3D. Together with COMSOL Multiphysics, Reaction Engineering Lab solves the flow field, composition, and temperature distribution in a nonideal reacting system.

The COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab will be available for shipment shortly. The pricing estimate at press time is $2,995. COMSOL Multiphysics is available for the Windows, Linux, Solaris, and the Macintosh operating systems. For complete details, visit the COMSOL website by clicking here.