Levenspiel O. Tracer Technology: Modeling the Flow of Fluids

Springer, 2012. — 152 p.
To tell how a vessel will behave as a heat exchanger, absorber, reactor, or other process unit, we need to know how fluid flows through the vessel. In early engineering practice, the designer assumed either plug flow or mixed flow of the fluid through the vessel. But these idealized assumptions are often not good, sometimes giving a volume wrong by a factor of 100 or more, or producing the wrong product in multiple reactions systems. The tracer method was then introduced, first to measure the actual flow of fluid through a vessel, and then to develop a suitable model to represent this flow. Such models are used to follow the flow of fluid in chemical reactors and other process units, in rivers and streams, and through solid and porous structures. Also, in medicine they are used to study the flow of chemicals, harmful or not, in the blood streams of animals and man. This book shows how we use tracers to follow the flow of fluids and then we develop a variety of models to represent these flows. This activity is called Tracer Technology.