Abstract
This paper presents an experimental study which demonstrates the potentiality of multifunctional heat exchangers (MHE) to carry out exothermal chemical reactions by the local control of the reactive environment temperature. Two highly exothermal chemical reactions with different kinetics (instantaneous and fast) have been investigated. The MHE is found to be very efficient in extracting the heat released by the chemical reactions. Due to its large heat transfer capacity, this process allows to increase considerably inlet reactant concentrations without thermal runaway and thus to enhance both chemical reaction conversion ratio and yield. This study also shows the limitations of the multifunctional heat exchanger for exothermal and instantaneous chemical reactions.
Highlights
Process intensification (PI) is a new concept which aims at fundamental improvements in process engineering
They compared micro-mixing level achieved in a plain Poiseuille flow, in a Poiseuille flow equipped with vortex generators of offset strip fins (OSF) type and a Poiseuille flow filled with different types of metallic foam
The chemical reaction evolution depends on four parameters: (i) chemical reactant concentration, (ii) micro-mixing level [18,19,20], (iii) reactive temperature, e.g
Summary
Process intensification (PI) is a new concept which aims at fundamental improvements in process engineering. The high mixing level and the high heat-transfer performance of turbulence promoters provided by a compact heat exchanger makes this device potentially useful as a chemical reactor: it is called a multifunctional heat exchanger (MHE) This technology offers many advantages such as better reaction control (from the thermal point of view), improved selectivity (through intensified mixing, more isothermal operation and shorter residence time, and sharper residence time distribution), by-products reduction and better safety. In a previous paper Ferrouillat et al [8] studied the micro-mixing time in three generic heat exchanger geometries by using a physico-chemical technique based on a parallel-competing reaction scheme and an incorporation model They compared micro-mixing level achieved in a plain Poiseuille flow, in a Poiseuille flow equipped with vortex generators of offset strip fins (OSF) type and a Poiseuille flow filled with different types of metallic foam.
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