Application of the engulfment model in assessing micromixing time of a micro-impinging stream reactor based on the determination of impinging zone with CFD

Abstract

Traditionally, study on the micromixing performance within reactors mostly relied on various competitive probe reactions through experiments or CFD simulations. In such simulations, component concentrations at the simulating-cell scale had to be firstly obtained and then applied to reaction kinetics to evaluate the micromixing. However, if reliable local concentration distributions can be obtained, no probe reactions are necessary anymore because intrinsically micromixing is about the mixing and distributions of the different components at the microscale. In this work, the engulfment model (E-model), without the aid of the probe reactions, was applied to simulate the micromixing time (tm) of a micro-impinging stream reactor based on the determination of the impinging zone through the flow field analysis with CFD. The effects of channel diameter and flow rates on tm were studied in details. The obtained tm agreed well with the results obtained through traditional approaches with the probe reactions.