Studies on the hydrolysis of urea for production of ammonia and modeling for flow characterization in presence of stirring in a batch reactor using computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

Ammonia is a highly volatile noxious material with adverse physiological effects, which becomes intolerable even at very low concentrations and presents substantial environmental and operating hazards and risk. But ammonia has long been known to be useful in the treatment of flue gases from the fossil fuel combustion process, such as in industrial furnaces, incinerators and coal-fired electric power generating plants. The present study is concerned with the methods and means to safely produce relatively small amount (i.e., up to 50 kg/hour) of ammonia. Current study involves experimental investigation for hydrolysis of urea for production of ammonia in a batch reactor at different temperature ranging from 110 °C to 180 °C against different initial feed concentration (10, 20, and 30 wt%) with different stirring speed ranging from 400 rpm to 1,400 rpm. Three-dimensional geometry and meshing of reactor is created in Gambit, a preprocessor of the commercial software, Fluent, for hydrodynamic study.