Liquid-liquid Slug Flow in a Microchannel Reactor and its Mass Transfer Properties -A Review (original) (raw)
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Over the last ten to fifteen years, microreaction technology has become of increased interest to both academics and industrialists for intensification of multiphase processes. Amongst the vast application possibilities, fast, highly exothermic and/or mass transfer-limited gas-liquid reactions benefit from process miniaturization. Recent studies of hydrodynamics and mass transfer in gas-liquid microreactors with closed and open microchannels, e.g., falling-film microreactors, are reviewed and compared. Special attention is paid to Taylor or slug flow in closed channels, as this regime seems to be most adapted for practical engineering applications.
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Microreactor technology, an important method of process intensification, offers numerous potential benefits for the process industries. Fluid-fluid reactions with mass transfer limitations have already been advantageously carried out in small-scale geometries. In liquid-liquid microstructured reactors (MSR), alternating uniform slugs of the twophase reaction mixture exhibit well-defined interfacial mass transfer areas and flow patterns. The improved control of highly exothermic and hazardous reactions is also of technical relevance for large-scale production reactors. Two basic mass transfer mechanisms arise: convection within the individual liquid slugs and diffusion between adjacent slugs. The slug size in liquid-liquid MSR defines the interfacial area available for mass transfer and thus the performance of the reactor. There are two possibilities in a slug flow MSR depending on the interaction of the liquids with the solid wall material: a dispersed phase flow in the form of an enclosed slug in the continuous phase (with film-complete wetting of the continuous phase) and an alternate flow of two liquids (without film-partial wetting of the continuous phase). In the present work, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methodology is developed to simulate the slug flow in the MSR for both types of flow systems. The results were validated with the experimental results of Tice et al.
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