Studies on the synthesis of chemical reaction paths-II. reaction schemes with two degrees of freedom

A reactive system, with a number of species larger than the number of elements involved, has meaningful invariant algebraic properties in the space of the Gibbs function of reaction and temperature These properties, developed for a reactive system with two degrees of freedom, show that an, in principle, an infinite number of reactions can be reduced to smaller clusters whose thermodynamic feasibility can be evaluated through simple measures. The invariant algebraic properties of reactive systems in the [ΔG, T] space, together with the definition of a bounded feasibility region in the same space, allow the formulation of a search algorithm, which is used for the synthesis of feasible chemical production schemes. These ideas are demonstrated in an application to C₁ chemistry, indicating that the approach developed can generate reaction paths some of which coincide with existing commercial processes.