Abstract
In this research, computational fluid dynamics was applied to model a laboratory reactor for the degumming of crude palm oil (CPO) involving immiscible liquid-liquid mixing and being controlled by mass transfer. The fluid mixing of CPO and phosphoric acid in the reactor was simulated using multiphase mixture model and standard κ-ε turbulence model in steady state mode. The simulation predicts the distributions of the drop diameter, the dispersed-phase relative velocity, the drop Reynolds number and the interfacial area density. The mass transfer coefficient from experimental work is correlated using the model as Sherwood number Shd = 0.02576 Red0.673Sc0.431 with R2 being 0.91. Finally, the volumetric mass transfer coefficient was calculated and compared to the experiment result.
Highlights
Degumming is an important step in crude palm oil (CPO) refining
The volume of the reactant mixture was 100 mL consisting of CPO as continuous phase and phosphoric acid solution (H3PO4 85%) as dispersed phase
The reaction was run for 120 minutes with initial content of gum in CPO being 1.43%
Summary
Degumming is an important step in crude palm oil (CPO) refining. It reduces or removes gum content from CPO. Some correlations are merely based on dimensional analysis and fully empirical, while others are based on turbulence and relative velocity theories The latter is built upon the effect of forced convection around particles on mass transfer rate. Other authors derived expressions for relative velocities by solving motion equations of suspended particles in flow fields [4] This approach uses local parameters (relative velocities between phases) to describe flow dynamicsdependentmass transfers. Relative velocities can be calculated using semianalytical methods with some assumptions It is limited by flow geometries of mixing process. A mixture model is used to simulate crude palm oil (CPO) degumming process in a laboratory reactor. The model was solved to predict the flow distribution and pattern so that the effect of different internal geometries of the reactor can be quantified
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