MATLAB and Simulink Seminars

The Chemical Reaction Engineering Toolbox

Overview

A fundamental knowledge and a basic understanding of the interactions between chemical reactions and various transport processes is essential for a proper design of chemical reactors and related processes. However, presenting those fundamentals has been difficult to present in the classroom to motivate the students to rise to the challenges. Therefore the Chemical Reactor Design Toolbox was developed to provide a tool to address the challenge through an innovative, creative and playful approach.

This toolbox is implemented as a new library for the Simscape framework consisting of basic blocks. Each block represents either a balancing control volume, a physical transport process (for mass, heat and momentum), a source/sink due to a chemical reaction or a thermodynamic phase equilibrium. A multicomponent mixture of an arbitrary number of individual species is considered in each phase (gas, solid, liquid and interface).

By combining several basic blocks into subsystems composite blocks can be defined. Iteratively applied, hierarchical multi-scale models can be created from scratch without the need of writing a single line of code (no-code programming).

The toolbox has been successfully applied in the last years at our university in chemical engineering, biochemical reaction engineering, and electrochemical reaction engineering courses. In addition, digital twins of actual experimental setups have been created to provide a quasi hands-on experience for the students to train their experimental skills without the need of placing expensive laboratory equipment at their disposal.

After introducing the paradigms of the modeling approach several examples from classroom experience will be presented in the talk demonstrating the versability of the Chemical Reactor Design Toolbox. Furthermore, an outlook is given how the toolbox can be used to create multi-scale-models e.g. for multi-phase trickle-bed-reactors.

Who Should Attend

Chemical engineering faculty, researchers, students, industry professionals and anyone interested in reaction kinetics and reactor modeling.

About the Presenter

Dr. Schnitzlein has been a professor for Chemical Reaction Engineering for almost three decades at the Brandenburg Technical University. He received his Dr. degree from the university of Erlangen-Nürnberg modelling catalytic multi-scale gas-phase reactors under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hanns Hofmann. Since this time he is involved in modelling and design of chemical reactors of all kinds (e.g. catalytic multi-phase reactors, biochemical-reactors, electro-chemical reactors). He has published over 60 papers in internationally renowned journals. Particularly he is interested in developing computer-based training tools for students. 

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