Chapter 5 – Distributions

Publisher Summary There are some well-known problems in chemical engineering where distribution functions come into play; the classical example is that of the residence time distribution (RTD) in a reactor. This chapter discusses some basic features of the classical problems and some extensions to nontraditional problems. In particular, it focuses attention on problems where in actual fact the distribution is a histogram, but things are made easier by considering continuous distribution functions rather than histograms. The fundamental distribution in a continuous description is the mass distribution m(u): m(u)du represents the mass of components with label between u and u+du. The chapter also discusses the concepts of continuous thermodynamics of phase equilibria, continuous homogenous chemical equilibria. Furthermore, the continuous description of chemical kinetics of multicomponent mixtures is presented.