UCLA

Carbon and NOx emissions have been a major drawback in the industry of air pollution control. Monolith reactors have thrived from their effective use in reducing those air pollutants from both automotive and industrial power plants. This work focuses on the optimization of monolith reactor design by first developing a 3-D mathematical model for an isothermal, rectangular monolith reactor featuring first order irreversible volumetric and surface reactions. Then solving the species mass, continuity, momentum and heat balance equations necessary for each plug flow, fully developed laminar flow and developing fluid flow models, with a known inlet reactant mass fraction/concentration and volumetric flowrate. Finally, a systematic optimization algorithm technique is used depending on the fluid flow considered to optimize the non-convex optimization problem that aims for a maximum conversion subject to capital cost to production ratio and pumping/compression cost to production ratio that determines an upper bound on the fluid velocity. Comparison of results between each fluid flow model developed is discussed in each series.