On Diffusion, Reaction, and Flow of High-Concentration Multicomponent Gas Mixtures

Abstract

Heterogeneous catalysis contributes to producing more than 80 % of all chemical products in the world. Industrial heterogeneous catalysis is a complex process that combines fully three-dimensional mass, momentum, and energy transport on several scales. In the present work, we leverage our previously developed CFD solver for non-isothermal heterogeneously catalyzed reactive flow based on the finite-volume method and extend it with multicomponent Stefan-Maxwell diffusion description to handle high-concetration multicomponent mixtures. The resulting framework is verified and validated on the simple Stefan tube experiment, for which an analytical solution is available.