"Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"-Reflections on the multiplicity of steady states of the stirred tank reactor

Abstract

The question of the multiplicity of the steady states of a chemical reactor was one of the concerns in the pioneering work of Bilous and Amundson. Their diagrams showed quite clearly the geometry of the situation, and this kind of analysis sufficed for many years. It remained for Balakotaiah and Luss, using the methods of singularity theory, to give a comprehensive treatment of the question. After a brief survey, we take up the case of consecutive first-order reactions and show that up to seven steady states are possible. © 1986.