Allowance for longitudinal diffusion in the neighborhood of a discontinuity of catalytic surface properties

Abstract

In the investigation of flow near surfaces with discontinuous changes in the catalytic properties the question arises of the applicability of parabolic boundary and viscous shock layer equations in the neighborhood of the discontinuity. In the present paper, three types of problem are solved in which longitudinal diffusion is taken into account. In the first an insertion with different catalytic properties is placed in the neighborhood of the stagnation point, in the second the discontinuity lines of the catalytic properties are perpendicular to the oncoming flow, while in the third they are parallel. On the main surface and on the insertion surface the heterogeneous catalytic reactions are assumed firstorder reactions with various rate constants whose values vary in a wide range. The data of the solution are compared with the solution obtained using the boundary layer approximation and the regions of influence of the longitudinal diffusion are estimated. In [1–4] a problem similar to the second one was solved by the numerical method of [1] and the Wiener-Hopf method for the case of transition from a noncatalytic to a perfectly catalytic surface and the region of applicability of the boundary layer was estimated [5].