Chemical products such as enzymes, antibiotics, solvents, proteins, antibodies, vaccines, hormones, interferons, etc. are in great demand as commercial commodities. There is an emerging trend towards utilizing biochemical processes for creating these products.These processes are characterized by their low energy requirement, the specificity of the chemicals produced and their mild environmental conditions.

All chemical and biochemical processes require a reaction vessel, a reactor, along with otherdownstream processing equipment. The reactor is recognized as the heart of any reaction process – its efficiency determines the economic feasibility of the process. Designing an efficient reactor requires the knowledge of appropriate kinetics, favourable hydrodynamic conditions and suitable mass and heat transfer.

The book deals with some basic aspects of reactor design for both chemical and biochemical systems. The first three chapters introduce the kinetics of chemical reaction engineering, the mechanistic model of catalytic gas-solid reactions and the residence time distribution for non-ideal reactors. These concepts are extended to biochemical reactor design. Characteristic features of enzyme kinetics both in free and immobilized state and microbial rate processes are covered in successive chapters. Advanced topics such as reactor dynamics, transport phenomena and membrane bioreactors have been incorporated wherever appropriate. The theoretical explanation is supported by solved and unsolved numerical problems.