A specialty-chemical batch reactor case study — worked second-order reaction time, reactor volume sizing against a daily production target, jacket heating/cooling duties, exotherm removal, and the full batch cycle time that sets reactor count.
The project brief: design a batch reactor for a liquid-phase A + B → P synthesis to deliver 5,000 kg/day of product at 95% conversion. Framed as this program's baseline reaction-engineering project, it walks the full sizing sequence a process engineer would actually run — the second-order batch time equation, reactor volume sizing worked backward from the production target, jacket duty calculations for heat-up and cool-down, and the exotherm removal rate that drives the reaction-phase utility selection.
This module works every number from that same production target and kinetics data: the 63.3-minute reaction time, the 3.51 m³ working volume that sets a 5,000 L vessel, the heating and cooling jacket duties sized from UA·ΔT, why the reaction hold needs a colder jacket service than the post-reaction cool-down, and the full batch cycle time that determines how many reactors the plant actually needs. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.