Liquid-liquid flow pattern and mass transfer in a rotating millimeter channel reactor

Abstract

Currently, microchannels are widely used in liquid-liquid heterogeneous mass transfer systems due to its excellent mass transfer performance. However, because of the passive mixing principle of traditional microchannels, the improvement of mass transfer performance has a bottleneck. This work proposes a novel rotating millimeter channel reactor (RMCR), capable of achieving liquid-liquid heterogeneous mass transfer enhance by centrifugal force. Three typical flow patterns of slug flow, parallel-droplet flow, and parallel flow in the RMCR were observed by high-speed photography technology. The volumetric mass transfer coefficient (K O a) of the RMCR increased with the increase of the total volumetric flow rate and rotational speed (N) increased. Compared with N = 0 r/min, the K O a of the RMCR increases by 61.5 % at 200 r/min, ranging from 0.013 to 0.021 s−1. The RMCR proposed in this work is expected to be applied to the liquid-liquid heterogeneous mass transfer system with high processing capacity and easy plugging.