Approximate characteristics of a moving temperature front in a fixed-bed catalytic reactor: Effect of mass dispersion

We derive approximate relations for the propagation velocity and the maximal temperature rise of an “ideal” 1-D front in a pseudo-homogeneous packed bed reactor (PBR) model with a first order activated kinetics, accounting for a finite mass Peclet number (PeC). These relations are compared with known approximations for PeC→∞ and are verified by direct numerical simulations showing a good agreement within a wide domain of parameters if PeC>PeT, which typically applies for PBRs.