EXPERIMENTAL AND THEORETICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE VALIDITY OF ASYMPTOTIC LUMPED KINETICS

Continuum approximation is often used to treat problems involving reac tion mixtures of a vast number of species. Previous studies predicted that in many situations the lumped kinetics of a continuum of reaction s, regardless of their kinetics, are of the power law form after a lon g time. In this article we present experimental support for such asymp totic power law kinetics. The system considered is catalytic deep desu lfurization of a petroleum distillate. In addition, a theoretical anal ysis is made to establish the condition under which the continuum appr oximation is valid in the long-time limit. The condition turns out not to be very stringent for practical purposes.