Fischer-Tropsch

[ermorgan]

Has anyone out there tried to model a FT reactor? The output is a spectrum of hydrocarbons of the form CnH2n so the kinetics are basically probabilistic chain growth with CH2 building blocks. Any suggestions are welcome.

[jasper]

Polymerization in general is subject to modelling of this kind as you cannot realistically introduce an actual compound for each chain length. Are you assuming all your FT products are linear? Then I suggest you create a property package with a distribution of chain lengths, and make a custom reactor (e.g. in Matlab, Excel, Scilab, ...) that does the statistics on the distributions and the mapping from feed to product.