Characterization of hydrodynamics and mass transfer in two types of tubular electrochemical reactors

• The flow field of novel vertical-flow tubular electrochemical reactor with mesh electrodes (VTER) and traditional concentric tubular electrochemical reactor with plate electrodes (CTER) were compared.
• The relationship between mass transfer coefficients and tube flow velocity and pressure drop in VTER and CTER were obtained.

Electrochemical treatment is an environmentally friendly method of removing pollutants from industrial wastewater. The tubular electrochemical reactor is one kind of electrochemical reactor. The current density distribution on the electrode surface in a traditional concentric tubular reactor is not homogeneous and the working area of the anodes and cathodes is unequal. Therefore, a novel tubular electrochemical reactor based on plug flow fluid orthogonal with mesh plate electrodes is presented. In this work, fluid flow and hydrodynamics of the vertical-flow tubular electrochemical reactor, such as velocity distribution and turbulent intensity distribution using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, are studied by comparing them to the traditional one. The electro-oxidation of phenol simulation wastewater treatment was developed to analyze the mass transfer performance of the two types of electrochemical reactors. In the novel tubular electrochemical reactor, due to the presence of mesh electrodes, the velocity distribution tended to be more homogeneous. In fact, the turbulent intensity clearly increased by 200% around the electrode surface. The kinetics of organic compounds removal in the novel tubular electrochemical reactor was also improved. Under the same flow rate, the improvement of the mass transfer coefficient for the novel tubular electrochemical reactor was more than twice that of the traditional tubular electrochemical reactor.