## Solving integral equations with fsolve

| categories: nonlinear algebra | tags: reaction engineering | View Comments

Occasionally we have integral equations we need to solve in engineering problems, for example, the volume of plug flow reactor can be defined by this equation: $$V = \int_{Fa(V=0)}^{Fa} \frac{1}{r_a} dFa$$ where $$r_a$$ is the rate law. Suppose we know the reactor volume is 100 L, the inlet molar flow of A is 1 mol/L, the volumetric flow is 10 L/min, and $$r_a = -k Ca$$, with $$k=0.23$$ 1/min. What is the exit molar flow rate? We need to solve the following equation:

$$100 = \int_{Fa(V=0)}^{Fa} \frac{1}{-k Fa/\nu} dFa$$

We start by creating a function handle that describes the integrand. We can use this function in the quad command to evaluate the integral.

import numpy as np
from scipy.optimize import fsolve

k = 0.23
nu = 10.0
Fao = 1.0

def integrand(Fa):
return -1.0 / (k * Fa / nu)

def func(Fa):
return 100.0 - integral

vfunc = np.vectorize(func)


We will need an initial guess, so we make a plot of our function to get an idea.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

f = np.linspace(0.01, 1)
plt.plot(f, vfunc(f))
plt.xlabel('Molar flow rate')
plt.savefig('images/integral-eqn-guess.png')
plt.show()

>>> >>> [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x964a910>]
<matplotlib.text.Text object at 0x961fe50>


Now we can see a zero is near Fa = 0.1, so we proceed to solve the equation.

Fa_guess = 0.1
Fa_exit, = fsolve(vfunc, Fa_guess)
print 'The exit concentration is {0:1.2f} mol/L'.format(Fa_exit / nu)

>>> The exit concentration is 0.01 mol/L


## 1 Summary notes

This example seemed a little easier in Matlab, where the quad function seemed to get automatically vectorized. Here we had to do it by hand.