Continuous lumping in a maximum-mixedness reactor

Abstract Continuous lumping of nonlinear chemical kinetics has been the subject of several recent papers. These have mostly addressed the case of a batch, or equivalently a plug flow reactor; only one paper has considered the case of a continuous stirred tank reactor, and another one gives implicitly the analysis for a maximum segregation reactor of arbitrary residence time distribution. In the present paper, the analysis of a continuous mixture is carried out for the converse case of a maximum-mixedness reactor with arbitrary residence time distribution. The resulting equations need to be solved numerically except in the most trivial cases which can be solved directly by shortcuts. Although no such numerical solutions are presented, the formal approach to the problem is developed in general, and it is shown that mixtures respond to changes from maximum segregation to maximum mixedness in a way which is different from the one exhibited by single reactants.