Enhancement of heat transfer and thermal homogenity with motionless mixers

Abstract

AbstractMotionless mixers are well suited to augment heat transfer and to provide a uniform thermal environment in laminar flow reactors. Heat transfer performance can be characterized with the Nusselt number, while the degree of thermal homogeneity can be characterized using the thermal time distribution which is the nonisothermal analogue of the residence time distribution. Theoretical results, calculations, and design strategies are presented for a variety of mixer types including flow inverters as well as the more common flow dividers. Two‐channel, partial flow inversion is an excellent, near optimal, strategy for cooling or other situations such as polymerizations which give elongated velocity profiles. For flattened velocity profiles, perfect mixing can sometimes give better results. In practice, however, partial inverters can be expected to outperform those motionless mixers which are primarily flow dividers.