Chemistry and Chemical Engineering

  Transport phenomena in porous media (Advanced transport phenomena)   • In nature and in a large number of practical applications it is common to find porous media. • At a microscopic scale and in a general sense, virtually every solid material can be considered as being porous, with the exception of metallic structures, dense rocks and some plastics. • The existence of reliable models to predict the behavior of porous media and of the transport phenomena occurring inside them can be very important in many scientific and technological areas. Chemical process engineering:   • Fixed bed reactors, filtration, drying, trickle bed reactors, chromatography, adsorption/desorption, ionic change, fuel cells, catalytic converters to reduce pollutant emissions from vehicles, absorption and distillation columns with and without chemical reaction.   • Environmental engineering: migration of contaminants in soil and ground water, irrigation, soils cleaning with vapo...

  Simultaneous Heat and Mass Transfer (Advanced transport phenomena) Heat transfer and mass transfer are kinetic processes that may occur and be studied separately or jointly. Studying them apart is simpler, but both processes are modelled by similar mathematical equations in the case of diffusion and convection (there is no mass-transfer similarity to heat radiation), and it is thus more efficient to consider them jointly. Besides, heat and mass transfer must be jointly considered in some cases like evaporative cooling. The usual way to make the best of both approaches is to first consider heat transfer without mass transfer, and present at a later stage a briefing of similarities and differences between heat transfer and mass transfer, with some specific examples of mass transfer applications. There are complex problems where heat and mass transfer processes are combined with chemical reactions, as in combustion. But many times the chemical process is so fast or so slow...