Fluidic control of reactor flow—Pressure drop matching

Using no-moving-part fluidic valves to control reactant flows into chemical reactors has been discussed for a considerable time, but as yet is not so widespread as its obvious advantages would deserve. One of the main reasons is the encountered problems associated with matching the properties of the valve and the reactor – particularly if the latter is of short residence time type. The matching is complicated by there being two matching criteria to be met, often mutually incongruent. On one hand, it is the optimality of mass transfer (no spillover); on the other hand, it is the optimality of hydraulic power transfer. In this paper, the procedure for balancing and matching the pressure drops across the devices is derived and demonstrated on a model example, using simplified 2D computation results for a family of simple premixed-reaction chemical minireactors and two families of small fluidic bistable valves.