Mass and heat transfer enhancement by a novel mixer with triangular-notched rectangular baffles for continuous flow chemical process

Abstract

Mass transfer efficiency, heat transfer efficiency, and treatment capacity play important roles in the continuous flow chemical process. To enhance the continuous flow chemical process, a novel mixer with triangular-notched rectangular baffles structure was designed and optimized. The performance of mixers was characterized by a comprehensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method that couples heat and mass transfer. The results show that the optimized mixer has a maximum increase of 4.25 times in mixing efficiency and 83.8% in heat transfer compared with 10 mm mixer without baffles structure. Furthermore, the scale of the mixer with triangular-notched rectangular baffles structures was enlarged to 25 mm under the premise of ensuring high mass and heat transfer efficiency, low-pressure drop and high treatment capacity. This study provides a scale-up strategy for continuous flow chemical process enhancement.

Keywords:

• Baffles
• mass and heat transfer
• mixer
• numerical simulation
• process intensification
• scale up

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that we have no declaration of interest in connection with the work submitted.

Additional information

Funding

The research has been supported by The National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFC2101900, 2022YFC2105603 and 2019YFA0905000); The National Natural Science Foundation of China (21908094, 22178168, 22078150 and 22278221); Key Research and Development Plan of Jiangsu Province (SBE2022740422 and BE2021083); The Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, Frontier Project (BK20212003); Nanjing International Joint Research and Development Project (202002037); The Top-notch Academic Programs Project of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions. The computational resources generously provided by the High Performance Computing Center of Nanjing Tech University are greatly appreciated.