Heat Transfer in Microstructured Devices

Heat Transfer in Microstructured Devices 1183 Table 5.1 Values of Nu, Sh for different geometries and constant wall temperature [9],... 

Takeda, T., Kunitomi, K., Horie, T., Iwata, K., Feasibility study on the applicability of a diffusion-welded compact intermediate heat exchanger to next-generation high temperature gas-cooled reactor, Nucl. Eng. Des. 1997, 168,11-21. Bier W., Keller W., Linder G., Seidel, D., Schubert, K., Martin, H., Gas-to-gas heat transfer in micro heat exchangers, Chem. Eng. Process. 1993, 32, 33-43. Schubert, K., Brandner J., Fichtner M., Linder G., Schygulla, U., Wenka, A., Microstructure devices for applications in thermal and chemical process engineering, Microscale Therm. Eng. 2001, 5,17-39. www.fzk.de, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, 17 July 2004. 

Mkrostructured reactors (MSR) for heterogeneous catalytic processes mostly consist of a large number of parallel flow channels. At least one dimension of these channels is smaller than 1 mm, but rarely <100 pm. This leads to an increased heat transfer in the direction of the smallest dimension. The volumetric heat transfer performance in microstructured devices is several magnitudes higher than in conventional reactors. Therefore, even highly exothermic or endothermic reactions can be operated under near isothermal conditions and thermal runaway can be avoided (see Chapter 5). In addition, mass transfer between the bulk phase... 

Materials in a colloidal state are frequently preferred in industrial processing operations because their large surface areas per unit volume enhance chemical reactivity, adsorptive capacity, heat transfer rates, and so on. Therefore, one cannot overlook the importance of the flow behavior and properties of colloids since they exert a significant influence on the performance, efficiency, and economy of the process. Note that some examples of this (e.g., ceramic processing, electrophoretic display devices, and food colloids) were mentioned in the vignettes presented in Chapter 1. In addition, one often uses the flow properties and behavior of the products as measures of the microstructure (or, morphology ) of the products and as a means of quality control (e.g., printing inks, toners, paints, skin creams, blood substitutes,... 

The relative heat and mass transfer performance of microstructured reactors with respect to conventional reactors is depicted in Figure 1.2. As can be seen, both in terms of heat and mass transfer, as explained above, microstructured devices offer superior performance. 

In this chapter, the microstructured devices are introduced underlying their potential benefits for the process industries. The reduced scale facilitates the temperature control giving an opportunity to maintain the temperature within any window required. Enhanced (heat/mass) transfer rates allow control of highly exothermic and hazardous reactions. It also increases production rates and thus reduces the total processing volume. In addition, microreactors can be simply numbered up for large-scale production, avoiding the problem of scale-up of conventional reactors. 

Foams were proved to be highly suitable as catalytic carrier when low pressure drop is mandatory. In comparison to monoliths, they allow radial mixing of the fluid combined with enhanced heat transfer properties because of the solid continuous phase of the foam structure. Catalytic foams are successfully used for partial oxidation of hydrocarbons, catalytic combustion, and removal of soot from diesel engines [14]. The integration of foam catalysts in combination with microstructured devices was reported by Yu et al. [15]. The authors used metal foams as catalyst support for a microstructured methanol reformer and studied the influence of the foam material on the catalytic selectivity and activity. Moritz et al. [16] constructed a ceramic MSR with an inserted SiC-foam. The electric conductive material can be used as internal heating elements and allows a very rapid heating up to temperatures of 800-1000°C. In addition, heat conductivity of metal or SiC foams avoids axial and radial temperature profiles facilitating isothermal reactor operation. 

Especially fast reactions benefit from the excellent mass transfer characteristics of microstructured devices. In addition, heat management for highly exothermic reactions is greatly facilitated because of efficient removal of heat produced during the reaction. Selective examples of different gas-liquid reactions that have been studied in the microstructured reactors are listed in Table 7.14. 

Most of the reported microstructured gas-liquid-solid reactors concern catalytic hydrogenations (Table 8.2). This is because hydrogenation reactions represent about 20% of all the reaction steps in a typical fine chemical synthesis. Catalytic hydrogenations are fast and highly exothermic reactions. Consequently, reactor performance and product selectivity are strongly influenced by mass transfer, and heat evacuation is an important issue. Both problems may be overcome using microstructured devices. 

In summary it seems that the ideal catalyst layer design in a microstructured devices is achieved by solving quantitatively the opposite trends between (i) porosity, which means effective diffusion and high specific activity, and (ii) denseness, which means high thermal conductivity and layer stability. The resulting maximum should lead to an optimal reactor design in terms of heat transfer and productivity determined by intrinsic kinetics. 

The above-described mixers are essentially low-viscosity devices. In many operations where the viscosity is high, when dealing with concentrated multiphase gas-liquid-solid binary or tertiary systems, or when liquid-to-solid phase transformation occurs during mixing, novel equipment designs are needed to intensify the heat/mass transfer processes. The multiphase fluids also represent an important class of materials that have microstructure developed during processing and subsequently frozen-in, ready for use as a product. To deliver certain desired functions, the control of microstructure in the product is important. This microstructure is developed in most cases by the interaction between the fluid flow and the fluid microstructure hence, uniformity of the flow field is important. 

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