1. General

1.1 Description

The reactor is the heart of chemical production units, found in refineries and metallurgical complexes, as well as in chemical and parachemical plants. In such industrial units, the reactor is generally surrounded by upstream and downstream equipment for the physical treatment of raw materials and reaction products. Reactors are also used in pollution control facilities to chemically purify a number of effluents (combustion gases, wastewater).

If, when visiting factories producing a wide variety of chemical products, we take the time to identify the equipment in which the chemical transformations take place, we may be surprised by the variety of shapes and sizes. We come across furnaces, boilers, tanks, columns, balloons, mixers, rotary kilns,...