Tubular reactors, turbulent flow

In Sect. 3.2, the development of the design equation for the tubular reactor with plug flow was based on the assumption that velocity and concentration gradients do not exist in the direction perpendiculeir to fluid flow. In industrial tubular reactors, turbulent flow is usually desirable since it is accompanied by effective heat and mass transfer and when turbulent flow takes place, the deviation from true plug flow is not great. However, especially in dealing with liquids of high viscosity, it may not be possible to achieve turbulent flow with a reasonable pressure drop and laminar flow must then be tolerated. 

In a continuous tank-type reactor, the flow should not follow preferential paths. In the continuous tubular reactor, the flow can be in extreme cases laminar (not desired) or turbulent (desired), but without dead volume. The type of flow may cause radial and longitudinal diffusion effects causing radial or axial temperature and concentration gradients and consequently affecting the chemical reaction. 

In CSTR reactors, the flow has preferential paths. In continuous tubular reactors, the flow may be laminar, turbulent, and have dead volumes. The flow may cause radial and longitudinal diffusion effects and therefore to result temperature gradients and radial/axial concentration. Therefore, the flow may affect the chemical reaction. 

Flow in tubular reactors can be laminar, as with viscous fluids in small-diameter tubes, and greatly deviate from ideal plug-flow behavior, or turbulent, as with gases, and consequently closer to the ideal (Fig. 2). Turbulent flow generally is preferred to laminar flow, because mixing and heat transfer... 

Peclet number independent of Reynolds number also means that turbulent diffusion or dispersion is directly proportional to the fluid velocity. In general, reactors that are simple in construction, (tubular reactors and adiabatic reactors) approach their ideal condition much better in commercial size then on laboratory scale. On small scale and corresponding low flows, they are handicapped by significant temperature and concentration gradients that are not even well defined. In contrast, recycle reactors and CSTRs come much closer to their ideal state in laboratory sizes than in large equipment. The energy requirement for recycle reaci ors grows with the square of the volume. This limits increases in size or applicable recycle ratios. 

A summary of the nine batch reactor emulsion polymerizations and fifteen tubular reactor emulsion polymerizations are presented in Tables III IV. Also, many tubular reactor pressure drop measurements were performed at different Reynolds numbers using distilled water to determined the laminar-turbulent transitional flow regime. 

Figure 9. Monomer conversion vs. polymerization time in the helical tubular reactor transition and turbulent flow regimes...

The maximum rate of polymerization has been confirmed to occur at the laminar-turbulent flow transition. The rate of polymerization was observed to be maximum at the transition for both straight reactors as well as for the helically-coiled reactor for which the transition is at a Reynolds number higher than that of the straight tube. The helically coiled tubular reactor is of industrial interest since it is much more compact and, consequently, the cost and the temperature control problems are more tractable. 

If the pilot reactor is turbulent and closely approximates piston flow, the larger unit will as well. In isothermal piston flow, reactor performance is determined by the feed composition, feed temperature, and the mean residence time in the reactor. Even when piston flow is a poor approximation, these parameters are rarely, if ever, varied in the scaleup of a tubular reactor. The scaleup factor for throughput is S. To keep t constant, the inventory of mass in the system must also scale as S. When the fluid is incompressible, the volume scales with S. The general case allows the number of tubes, the tube radius, and the tube length to be changed upon scaleup ... 

This section has based scaleups on pressure drops and temperature driving forces. Any consideration of mixing, and particularly the closeness of approach to piston flow, has been ignored. Scaleup factors for the extent of mixing in a tubular reactor are discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. If the flow is turbulent and if the Reynolds number increases upon scaleup (as is normal), and if the length-to-diameter ratio does not decrease upon scaleup, then the reactor will approach piston flow more closely upon scaleup. Substantiation for this statement can be found by applying the axial dispersion model discussed in Section 9.3. All the scaleups discussed in Examples 5.10-5.13 should be reasonable from a mixing viewpoint since the scaled-up reactors will approach piston flow more closely. 

There will be velocity gradients in the radial direction so all fluid elements will not have the same residence time in the reactor. Under turbulent flow conditions in reactors with large length to diameter ratios, any disparities between observed values and model predictions arising from this factor should be small. For short reactors and/or laminar flow conditions the disparities can be appreciable. Some of the techniques used in the analysis of isothermal tubular reactors that deviate from plug flow are treated in Chapter 11. 

This review paper is restricted to stirred vessels operated in the turbulent-flow regime and exploited for various physical operations and chemical processes. The developments in the field of computational simulations of stirred vessels, however, are not separated from similar developments in the fields of, e.g., turbulent combustion, flames, jets and sprays, tubular reactors, and multiphase reactors and separators. Fortunately, there is a strong degree of synergy and mutual cross-fertilization between these various fields. This review paper focuses on aspects specific to stirred vessels (such as the revolving impeller, the resulting strong spatial variations in turbulence properties, and the macroinstabilities) and on the processes carried out in them. 

Van Vliet, E., Derksen, J. J., and Van den Akker, H. E. A., Numerical Study on the Turbulent Reacting Flow in the Injector Region of an LDPE Tubular Reactor . Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Mixing, Bologna, Italy, pp. 719-726 (2006). 

If AW AW the process of finding a linear-mixture basis can be tedious. Fortunately, however, in practical applications Nm is usually not greater than 2 or 3, and thus it is rarely necessary to search for more than one or two combinations of linearly independent columns for each reference vector. In the rare cases where A m > 3, the linear mixtures are often easy to identify. For example, in a tubular reactor with multiple side-injection streams, the side streams might all have the same inlet concentrations so that c(2) = = c(iVin). The stationary flow calculation would then require only AW = 1 mixture-fraction components to describe mixing between inlet 1 and the Nm — I side streams. In summary, as illustrated in Fig. 5.7, a turbulent reacting flow for which a linear-mixture basis exists can be completely described in terms of a transformed composition vector ipm( defined by... 

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