Scale-up of a thermally coupled milli-scale wall coated reactor through a fractals-based reactor design approach

Abstract

As an alternative to thermally inefficient packed bed reactors, micro-scale reactors have been researched extensively due to their excellent heat and mass transfer characteristics. Nevertheless, their scope is restricted within specialty chemicals and other low volume production processes because of high pressure drop and difficulty in scale-up. Wall-coated milli-scale reactor combine merits of both packed bed and micro-scale reactors as they have low thermal resistances with high flow capacities at negligible pressure drop. Literature on milli-scale reactors is scarce. In this work we study scale up of a dual-channel milli-scale thermally integrated reactor. It is shown that the fractals-based Hilbert curve, when used as a generating function for the scaled-up reactor structure (HR), provides a systematic and compact way of scale-up of the dual-channel milli-scale reactor. The case of process intensification by a factor of up to 300 in terms of the integrated reaction rate is illustrated through CFD modelling. Effects of varying inlet and wall boundary conditions in the dual-channel reactor and the HR reactor are explored. The intensified reactor can be manufactured with accuracy and repeatability by additive manufacturing techniques.