Investigation on strengthening effect of metal foams in enlarged microchannels for heterogeneous liquid-liquid mass transfer

In this work, to enhance the mass transfer process between two heterogeneous phases in the enlarged microchannel, the metal foam was filled into the quartz channel. First, the homogeneous iodate system was employed to investigate the mixing efficiency of fluids flowing through the metal foam. The results indicate that the mixing efficiency improves with increasing metal foam length and pore density. Secondly, the extraction and mass transfer efficiency of metal foam was studied by using the n-butanol-succinic acid system (heterogeneous). The results showed that the extraction efficiency and mass transfer performance of metal foam with a pore density of 60 PPI and a length of 10 cm were the best, reaching 56 % and 0.297 s^-1. Finally, the enhancement of metal foam on the reaction process was investigated by the oxidation process of phenylene sulfide, and the metal foam with the best mass transfer performance was selected for the experiment. Under the residence time of 15 min, the conversion of the raw material reached 86.57 %, which was nearly 4 times higher than that channel without structural inserts. Therefore, it is a very meaningful strategy to strengthen the mass transfer process by using the enlarged microchannels filled with metal foam.