Lakshmi Sridhar, Chemical Engineering, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez campus, P.O. Box 9046, Mayaguez, PR 00681, Raghunathan Rengaswamy, Chemical Engineering, Clarkson University, Box 5705, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY 13699-5705, and Gerardo Ruiz, Chem Engg, UPR Mayaguez, PO Box 9046, UPRM, Mayaguez, PR 00681.
In this paper we present some results for isothermal isobaric reactive separation process problems. We show that the Rachford-Rice procedure can be extended to reactive systems. We also demonstrate that even in isothermal isobaric reactive separation processes which is probably the least nonlinear of all reactive separation processes we get nonlinear phenomenon such as Hopf bifurcations. While it has been shown that Hopf bifurcations are impossible in isothermal CSTR problems and also in non-reactive flash problems, we demonstrate in this paper that isothermal reactive flash processes involving both MTBE and TAME mixtures exhibit Hopf bifurcations.