kmolh

Kilomole per hour (kmol/h) is a unit of molar flow rate used in chemistry and chemical engineering. It denotes the amount of substance, measured in kilomoles, that passes through a point, is consumed in a reaction, or is produced by a process in one hour. The term is commonly written kmol/h or kmol h^-1 and is widely used for industrial-scale processes.

Relation to SI and conversion: 1 kmol/h equals 1000 mol/h, which is 1000/3600 ≈ 0.2778 mol/s. Conversely, 1 mol/s equals 3.6 kmol/h. The SI unit of amount of substance is the mole and time is the second; kmol/h is a conventional unit accepted for use with SI, particularly in reactor design, process control, and mass-balance calculations.

Applications and context: kmol/h is used to specify feed and product streams, conversion rates, and reactor or column throughputs. It is convenient when dealing with large-scale production, gas flows, or batch processes where molar quantities are naturally expressed in thousands of moles per hour.

Notes on notation: some texts write kmolh^-1 or kmol/h without a slash. When performing calculations, it is important to keep track of units and to convert to the SI-compatible mol/s or mol/h as needed. Example: a process yielding 5 kmol/h of product corresponds to about 1.39 mol/s.