Isothermal reaction calorimetry as a tool for kinetic analysis

Reaction calorimetry has found widespread application for thermal and kinetic analysis of chemical reactions in the context of thermal process safety as well as process development. This paper reviews the most important reaction calorimetric principles (heat-flow, heat-balance, power-compensation, and Peltier principle) and their applications in commercial or scientific devices. The discussion focuses on the different dynamic behavior of the main calorimetric principles during an isothermal reaction measurement. Examples of available reaction calorimeters are further compared considering their detection limit, time constant as well as temperature range. In a second part, different evaluation methods for the isothermally measured calorimetric data are reviewed and discussed. The methods will be compared, focusing especially on the fact that reaction calorimetric data always contains additional informations not directly related to the actual chemical reaction such as heat of mixing, heat of phase-transfer/change processes or simple measurement errors. Depending on the evaluation method applied such disturbances have a significant influence on the calculated reaction enthalpies or rate constants. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.