Advanced reactor engineering with 3D printing for the continuous-flow synthesis of silver nanoparticles

Abstract

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Oscillatory fluid motion unlocks plug flow operation in helical tube reactors at lower Reynolds numbers (Re ≤ 10)

“…Further, the flow profiles in the DLP-SLA microfluidic device were comparable to more conventional fabricated materials in the laminar regime. In the Form2 printer used in this study, the root mean square surface roughness was 2.9 μm (using the 100 μm layer height setting) [34]. Thus, the relative roughness of the helically coiled channels in this study was 0.00058, similar to the value reported by MacDonald et al [33].…”

“…Therefore, it is likely that the bulk micro-mixing performance was not substantially affected by the surface roughness. Further, Okafor et al [34] successfully applied the Form2 printer for the fabrication of a 2.5 mm diameter meso-OBR, reporting Gaussian RTDs that indicated vortex formation was minimally influenced by the surface roughness.…”

“…For a pulse tracer injection, E(t) can be defined based on the concentration of tracer (C) using equation 5. According to this definition, the area under this curve is equal to 1, meaning the quantity "E(t)dt" describes the fraction of fluid that exits the reactor with a residence time between the particular integration limits [34]. For discrete data, E(t) is instead defined using equation 6, where C(t) is the concentration of tracer measured at time, t, and Δt is the sampling rate.…”

Manufactured chemistry: Rethinking unit operation design in the age of additive manufacturing

“…Recent work by Okafor et al used additive manufacturing to design an improved reactor which overcame an identified limitation of microscale tubular reactors. When the hydraulic diameters of the reactor channels get small, the Reynolds number of the flow is decreased and the flow is laminar, thus, the mixing becomes diffusion limited.…”

“…In the above examples additive manufacturing has been used by chemical sciences researchers mainly as a tool to build cheap experimental reactors in‐house and with precise control of geometry and interconnections to analytical setups. However, the work by Okafor et al demonstrates the ability to utilize physics‐based analysis of a reactor's shortcoming and then use physics‐driven design enabled by advanced manufacturing technologies to build a reactor with demonstrably better performance via manipulation of the reactor's geometric envelope.…”