how to set the temperature of a reactor

[Gianfranco Dell'Agli]

Dear all, I’m facing an issue with Cantera (version 3.2) that I haven’t been able to solve. I want to build a model of a combustion flue‑gas heat exchanger to analyze the chemical transformations occurring during cooling. I have assumed a temperature profile and I know the residence time of the flue gases inside the exchanger.

Following the Lagrangian approach suggested in the examples on the website, I would like to integrate in time using an IdealGasReactor, but with the temperature profile imposed by me rather than determined by the energy equation. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any way to set directly the reactor temperature: even calling syncState() after assigning the new temperature to the gas phase doesn’t work.

The only workaround I’ve found is to add a wall connected to a reservoir at the desired temperature and assign a very large heat‑transfer coefficient to the wall. Unfortunately, this approach is numerically unstable (on my old PC) and computationally expensive.

Does anyone have any suggestions or know of an alternative method? Thanks in advance,

Gianfranco