Continuous shock wave reactor for chemical production and reaction studies

Abstract

A continuous shock wave reactor with a single instrumented shock tube was built, based on the concept of a disc rotating within a concentric ring about a shaft perpendicular to the disc's plane. The shock tube is a small tube having a square cross section, which is also a diameter of the disc. The ring contains ports connected in sequence to a process gas reservoir at low pressure, a driver gas reservoir at high pressure, driver gas outlets and product sample containers. Rotation of the disc results in successive opening and closing of these ports causing the charging of the tube with process gas, the generation of shock waves rapidly heating the process gas and of rarefaction waves cooling it, and removal of driver and product gases. The ability to produce relatively large quantities of reaction products and the small size of the installation give this device an advantage over the usual single-pulse shock tube, especially in the study of trace components in complex product mixtures.