The mixing elements, catalyzed or inert, are a key to the improved performance of the new reactor. In the liquid phase where the flows are laminar, particulate mixing elements change the mass transport from molecular diffusion to convective diffusion, increasing it by a factor of 100,000. In the gas phase, the transport is increased by a factor of 100 and the flow is highly turbulent, which reduces the scale of mixing by turbulent eddies to a much smaller scale than the mixing element dimensions. It is clearly more uniform than could be achieved with several point injections of a reactant using a nonporous wall reactor, packed with catalyst particles, because of the high concentration gradients at the points of injection. The novel reactor environment is also more uniform than a series of mixed tanks containing slurries of catalyst particles with introduction into each tank.
Stirred tanks have intense mixing at the turbine tips and minimal mixing in the bulk of the volume.
In contrast, the Novel Reactor has uniform mixing in the entire reactor volume. Before the invention of the Novel Reactor described here, increases in selectivities or yields in catalytic processes depended nearly totally on developing improved catalysts. The proposed Novel Reactor offers an additional, orthogonal method for increasing selectivities and yields using existing catalysts. Furthermore, with future improved catalysts, the Novel Reactor will produce higher selectivities and yields than could be achieved in currently used reactors. The above description of the SRI reactor process focused on a single porous reactor tube.