Theoretical comparison of linear and nonlinear boundary sinks for species transport in isothermal multiple-compartment reactors

In this paper, we examine linear and nonlinear boundary sinks in compartments whose adjacent sides are separated with sieve partitions allowing transport of chemical species. The sieve partitions serve as boundary sinks of the system separating each compartment from the subsequent one. With assumption of unidirectional transport of chemical species, constant physical properties and same equilibrium constant, system of partial differential equations are derived. The spatial variables of the derived PDEs are discretized using Method of Lines (MOL) technique. The semi-discrete system formed from this technique produced a system of 105 ODEs which are solved using MATLAB solver ode15s. The results show that for strongly nonlinear boundary sinks, concentration profile maintains low profile in interconnected adjacent compartments. This suggests that as nonlinearity increases at the boundary, the concentration profile becomes increasingly low in subsequent compartments.