Numerical investigations of catalyst–liquid slurry flow in the photocatalytic reactor for hydrogen production based on algebraic slip model

A new device of photocatalytic reactor with solar concentrator for hydrogen production was introduced in this paper. In order to investigate the effects of the slurry flow and catalyst distributions in the reactor on photocatalysis for hydrogen production, an algebraic slip mixture model (ASM) was used to simulate the dynamics of the catalyst–water slurry flow. A block-structured non-uniform grid was applied to discretize the entire domain and an algebraic multi-grid (AMG) method was used to solve the pressure field. The mean slurry pressure gradients obtained by the model were in agreement with the experimental data in former literature. Based on this verification, catalyst particle distributions, slurry velocity distributions and inter-phase slip velocity distributions in photocatalytic reactor pipe were investigated. The results show that the catalyst tends to distribute near the bottom of the pipe in the reactor, leading to a concentration gradient along the vertical direction of cross section. But due to the effects of turbulence force against the gravity, a heterogeneous suspending state will be achieved in a fully developed flow.