University of Massachusetts Amherst
	Department of Mathematics and Statistics
	Applied Mathematics and Computation Seminar

Abstract: In the study of processes used in industrial catalysis, a new type of chemical reactor, referred to as T.A.P devices (for Temporal Analysis of Products), is gaining interest among engineers. In T.A.P. experiments, chemical reactions involving gases and metal catalysts are studied under conditions of well-controled gas injection and transport. The resulting system can be modeled by a very tractable reaction-diffusion equation involving first order reaction, which may be analyzed by analytic and stochastic methods. The main problems posed are: how to determine the yield of the reaction from information about the distribution of catalyst inside the reactor; and how to extricate from the combined effect of gas transport and reaction any useful information about chemical kinetics, such as reaction constants. I will present a number of results from undergraduate research by two recent math graduates at Washington University.