Scale‐up of Capillary Extraction Equipment

Abstract

AbstractIn order to fully exploit the outstanding mass transfer characteristics of liquid‐liquid slug flow in capillaries for technical extraction processes, it is necessary to employ numbering‐up to retain the underlying benefits of microscale operation. For optimal performance, each of the parallelized capillaries should be operated at the same flow rate, a similar phase ratio and with a single, uniform slug structure. Since the fabrication tolerances of microstructures make it difficult to construct distributors generating the uniform multiphase flow sought, a simple and affordable scheme for monitoring and regulating the slug flow in individual capillaries has been developed. The concept was implemented successfully for both simple aqueous‐organic biphasic flows and with more challenging systems exhibiting flow multiplicities as a consequence of viscosity changes.