Our department has recently procured a state-of-the-art system—a TAP reactor—to analyse and understand the mechanisms of complex gas-solid reactions occurring on catalyst surfaces. At its core, the TAP reactor is a packed bed operating under high-vacuum (so that diffusion is in the Knudsen rather than Fickian regime). Analysing the data from this reactor requires an understanding of reaction-diffusion processes and a corresponding mathematical model. By applying a model to the data produced by the TAP reactor one can back-out important physical properties like reaction rate constants, as well as understand the reaction mechanism.
The goal of this SLP is to develop the model for reaction and dispersion of a pulse of reactant through the TAP reactor. It will involve reaction-diffusion PDES, their analysis, and solution (analytically and numerically). There will also be a data-science flavour to the project since we wish to use data to obtain kinetic parameters (this is an inverse problem).