Hydrodynamic model of a microstructured plate reactor

A numerical model of a two-phase flow in a plate microreactor was developed. The model is based on a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach and was constructed with the help of an open-source toolbox OpenFOAM, which utilizes a finite volume method to solve the equations of a fluid motion. A cold flow, i.e. a flow without a reaction and a mass transfer was considered in this study. The model was validated by comparing with experimentally measured hydrodynamic parameters: gas holdup and the interfacial area of gas bubbles inside the existing prototype. Validated model was used to test several proposed plate structures for the next prototype. The structure with the highest gas–liquid interfacial area was was chosen for the construction.

► A CFD-based model of a two-phase flow inside an investigated microreactor is presented.
► The model considers only hydrodynamics without reactions. Only fully developed flow is investigated. The order of the model was successfully reduced from 3 dimensions to 2.
► The model is implemented using a freely available CFD library pack OpenFOAM and is built based on the predefined solver ‘interFoam’ from that pack.
► The model was validated and evaluated by comparison with experimental data, and a good agreement was achieved. The model was used to select the geometry for the next test reactor.