An improved shooting method for computation of effectiveness factors in porous catalysts

When applied to compute the concentration profile and the effectiveness factor in a porous catalyst, the conventional shooting method requires that the concentration at the catalyst center y(0) must be greater than zero to yield a nontrivial solution. Since, for reactions with reaction orders less than one, y(0) can become zero in the solution when the Thiele modulus is large, the applicability of the conventional method is limited. In this study we propose an improved shooting method which is absent of such limitations and yet retains the merits of the conventional shooting method. The proposed method is shown to be robust, efficient in computation of the effectiveness factors. Not only a single steady state, but also multiple steady states, can easily be identified with the proposed method. A simple rule for stability of a state is also given in the method. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.