Numerical simulation of propane pyrolysis in a flow chemical reactor under the influence of constant external heating

A numerical simulation of propane pyrolysis process in a flowing chemical reactor was performed in this work. In this case, chemical transformations are carried out due to external heating of the reaction zone. The velocity of gas motion in explored flows is much less then sound velocity in gas mixture, which motivates using the Navier–Stokes equations in approximation of low Mach numbers for describing the processes under study. The construction of a difference scheme is based on the use of the integro-interpolation method. To solve the equations of chemical kinetics, we used a specialized explicit second-order accuracy scheme with low computational complexity. To describe the chemical transformations of propane pyrolysis, the well-known kinetic scheme was used, which includes 30 elementary stages. However, in the work, for more accurate description of the process, the activation energy of one of the reaction stages was specified. The propane pyrolysis process was numerically simulated taking into account viscosity, diffusion and thermal conductivity for various temperatures of heating elements. The obtained results on propane conversion are compared with experimental data and other known numerical results for solving the problem under consideration. It is concluded that the developed numerical algorithm gives high reliability of the obtained results and can be applied in practice for modeling the processes under study.