Abstract
Continuous-flow crystallization of adipic acid in a millichannel chip equipped with a piezoelectric element is presented and investigated experimentally and numerically. A single, straight channel chip (cross section: 2 mm × 5 mm, length: 76 mm) made of glass, which is ultrasonically transparent, was designed and fabricated. The piezoelectric element allows studying the effect of different ultrasound frequencies in the kHz to MHz range. Ultrasound was applied in burst mode to reduce heating; this allowed operating at higher levels of input power. To accurately control the temperature of the fluid, Peltier elements were used to cool the bottom and top surfaces of the chip. Crystallization was performed in isothermal conditions, ensuring that the temperature and in turn the supersaturation were kept uniform along the channel. The effect of ultrasound frequency and sonication time was studied. Crystal size distributions at different operating conditions were obtained by laser diffraction. The distributions w...
Highlights
Crystallization is a complex process involving multiphase equilibrium, polymorphic transformations, and nucleation and growth kinetics
The reason for the presence of a peak in the attenuation curve is due to the strong dependence of the viscous, thermal, and acoustic damping on the wave frequency
A new continuous-flow, milliscale sonocrystallization device equipped with flat piezoelectric elements for production of adipic acid crystals is presented and studied
Summary
Crystallization is a complex process involving multiphase equilibrium, polymorphic transformations, and nucleation and growth kinetics. Sonication, the application of power ultrasound to process fluids, is an intensification technology that, when applied to crystallization, permits tailoring and improving significantly both process and product quality.[2,3] The additional degrees of freedom that ultrasound introduces render the process more flexible, offering the potential to selectively promote the different processes of crystallization (nucleation, breakage, etc.). This technology is called sonocrystallization (SC) and has rapidly developed over the last 20 years. This has been demonstrated for the flow of particle suspensions in small-channel heat exchangers, Received: May 6, 2016 Revised: July 8, 2016 Published: July 11, 2016
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