Reactive Chaotic Flows

Boesinger, C., Le Guer, Y., and Mory, M. (2005) Experimental study of reactive chaotic flows in tubular reactors. AIChE J., 51, 2122-2132. 

Understanding the interplay of the three mechanisms—reaction, diffusion, and convection—is essential. In light of what happens in 2D reactive chaotic flows, we can attempt to extend the analysis to 3D reactive mixing applications. Let us take a fresh look at a common 3D example, a mixing tank stirred with three... 

The role of mixing has been studied in systems with more complex reaction schemes or considering more complex fluid-dynamical properties, and in the context of chemical engineering or microfluidic applications (for reviews on microfluidics see e.g. Squires (2005) or Ottino and Wiggins (2004)). Muzzio and Liu (1996) studied bi-molecular and so-called competitive-consecutive reactions with multiple timescales in chaotic flows. Reduced models that predict the global behavior of the competitive-consecutive reaction scheme were introduced by Cox (2004) and by Vikhansky and Cox (2006), and a method for statistical description of reactive flows based on a con-... 

Figure 3-29 The evolution of a fast reaction in a mixing tank stirred with three Rushton impellers at Re = 20. The reactive zones in a stirred tank are identieal to the location of the intermaterial contact area in a mixing after 10, 20, 40, and 60 impeller revolutions. Each figure shows half of the vertical cross-section, where the shaft and three impeller blades are seen on the left. The upper half is a photograph of the reactive flow and the bohom is the computed chaotic mixing structure.

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