Abstract

Transport Intensification Strategies for Microstructured Reactors and its Application on the Reaction Process Control

Yuanhai Su, PostDoc, Eindhoven University of Technology

The principles of hydrodynamics, mixing, mass transfer and reaction processes between liquid-liquid two-phase systems in micro devices will be briefly introduced. Then, two novel methods including gas agitation and packing micro-particles for the further intensification of the mixing, mass transfer and reaction process between liquid-liquid two phases in microchannel reactors will be presented. A mathematical model for predicting the characteristic mixing time in microchannels will be deduced based on the experimental results of single liquid phase mixing processes. Meanwhile, the mechanism of controlling the reactions via adjusting the hydrodynamics in the microreactors will be described in details. Some dimensionless parameters used for predicting the mixing efficiency and the reaction processes in microreactors will be proposed. Furthermore, different scale-up strategies of microreactors for the liquid processes will be categorized and compared. Both numerical and experimental results will be provided to distinguish the important factors for the design optimization of multi-channnel micromixers arising from the numbering-up of single microchannels with zigzag structures. Finally, recent work on the metal-free photocatalytic aerobic oxidation of thiols to disulfides in capillary microreactors and relevant reaction kinetic strategies will be described. The transport phenomena including photon transport and mass transfer will be emphasized in order to obtain intrinsic kinetics via microreactor technology.