Numerical Simulation of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in a Counter-Current Reactor System for Nanomaterial Production
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Cai Y Ma
Continuous hydrothermal flow synthesis (CHFS) systems can provide high quality fine nanoparticles. However, optimisation of the CHFS system including the reactor and heat exchanger design, and their scaling-up for commercial applications have not been studied and cannot be achieved only through laboratory and pilot plant experiments. CFD modelling techniques are being widely used to simulate fluid field, heat and mass transfer in a lot of industrial process equipment. However, the application of CFD to model CHFS systems is still rare. This paper employs CFD methodology to simulate fluid flow and heat transfer in a counter-current reactor and a tubular heat exchanger of a laboratory-scale CHFS system for the production of TiO2 nanoparticles. The distributions of flow and heat transfer variables such as velocity and temperature in both units are obtained using ANSYS Fluent package. The tracer concentration profile is also simulated via solving the species equations to investigate the mixing behaviour in the counter-current reactor. Temperature distributions at different locations in a counter-current reactor and a tubular heat exchanger of a CHFS system were obtained experimentally. The simulated temperatures in both the reactor and the heat exchanger are compared with the available experimental data, which reveals that a good level of agreement is achieved.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Editorial: Special Issue of CAPE FORUM 2011
- Optimisation of Emulsion Copolymerization of Styrene and MMA in Batch and Semi-batch Reactors
- Modelling and Optimization of Crude Oil Hydrotreating Process in Trickle Bed Reactor: Energy Consumption and Recovery Issues
- An Optimization-Based Framework for Process Planning under Uncertainty with Risk Management
- Modelling and Control of Reactive Polymer Composite Moulding Using Bootstrap Aggregated Neural Network Models
- Numerical Simulation of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in a Counter-Current Reactor System for Nanomaterial Production
- Knowledge Based System Implementation for Lean Process in Low Volume Automotive Manufacturing (LVAM) with Reference to Process Manufacturing
- Novel Heuristic for Low-Batch Manufacturing Process Scheduling Optimisation with Reference to Process Engineering
- CFD Modelling of Reverse Osmosis Channels with Potential Applications to the Desalination Industry
