Quadratic autocatalysis in an extended continuous-flow stirred tank reactor (ECSTR)

•We consider quadratic autocatalysis in an ECSTR.•Periodic behaviour is impossible.•A membrane permeable only to the reactant increase the steady-state diagrams.

The continuous-flow stirred tank reactor (CSTR) is a standard tool used to investigate the behaviour of chemical processes subject to nonlinear kinetics. A recently proposed variation of the CSTR is the extended continuous-flow stirred tank reactor (ECSTR). This consists of a standard CSTR attached to an environmental tank reactor with mass transfer occurring between them through a membrane. The attraction of studying a reaction scheme in an ECSTR, rather than a CSTR, is that this offers the possibility of modifying the behaviour with a larger parameter dimension. We investigate how the behaviour of a standard non-linear chemical mechanism, quadratic autocatalysis subject to linear decay, changes when it is studied in an ECSTR rather than a CSTR.