Teaching Residence Time Distributions in the Laboratory

This article describes the approaches that have been used in the laboratory teaching of Residence Time Distribution (RTD) analysis for the study of chemical reactors, in the Chemical Engineering courses at Instituto Superior Tecnico—Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa (IST) and at Faculdade de Engenharia—Universidade do Porto (FEUP). An integrated set of experiments has been used to allow the students to test the fundamental knowledge and to analyze working reactors. This involves determining RTDs, both by impulse and step tracer injection techniques, and applying them to the modeling of the reactor flow and to the estimation of the behavior of a non-linear chemical transformation. Very simple forms of obtaining non-ideal reactor behavior are used, such as deficient agitation in continuous stirred tank reactors. Continuous tubular reactors were manufactured so as to present axially dispersed plug flow and laminar flow.