The residence time distribution (RTD) of a chemical reactor is a probability distribution function that describes the amount of time a fluid element could spend inside the reactor. Chemical engineers use the RTD to characterize the mixing and flow within reactors and to compare the behavior of real reactors to their ideal models. This is useful, not only for troubleshooting existing reactors, but in estimating the yield of a given reaction and designing future reactors.
The concept was first proposed by MacMullin and Weber in 1935, but was not used extensively until P.V. Danckwerts analyzed a number of important RTDs in 1953.
Read more about Residence Time Distribution: Theory, Determining The RTD Experimentally, RTDs of Ideal and Real Reactors
Famous quotes containing the words residence, time and/or distribution:
“My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Don’t feel guilty if you don’t immediately love your stepchildren as you do your own, or as much as you think you should. Everyone needs time to adjust to the new family, adults included. There is no such thing as an “instant parent.”
Actually, no concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)