Effect of Oscillation Amplitude on the Residence Time Distribution for the Mesoscale Oscillatory Baffled Reactor

A recent development in oscillatory baffled reactor technology is down-scaling the reactor, so that it can be used for the applications such as small-scale continuous production of bioethanol. A mesoscale oscillatory baffled reactor (MOBR) with central baffle system was developed and fabricated at mesoscales (typically 5 mm diameter). This present work aims to analyse the mixing conditions inside the MOBR by evaluating the residence time distribution (RTD) against the dynamic parameters of net flow Reynolds number ( Re n ) at 4.2, 8.4 and 12.6 corresponding to flow rates of 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 ml/min respectively, oscillatory Reynolds number ( Re o ) between 62 to 622, and Strouhal number ( Str ) between 0.1 to 1.59. The effect of oscillation frequency and amplitude on RTD performance were studied at frequency, amplitude, and velocity ratio ranging from 4 to 8 Hz, 1 to 4 mm and 1 to 118, respectively. Effect of oscillation frequency has resulted in the variance of the RTD increased as the oscillation frequency increased from 5 Hz to 8 Hz and peak at 6 Hz of 0.264. A further increase in the frequency above 5 Hz caused the RTD to slightly broaden and positively skewed. At frequency of 5 Hz, the RTD profiles were close to Gaussian form for all tested amplitude values from 1 mm to 4 mm. At low amplitudes, i.e. xo = 1 mm, the variance exhibited its minimum around 0.842 at Re o =156. An increase in Re o above 300 resulted in increased in the variance rapidly to 1.28, and later eliminated the plug flow behaviour and the reactor behaved similar to a single continuous stirred tank reactor. Chemical Engineering Research Bulletin 19(2017) 111-117