Design and characterization of bubble-splitting distributor for scaled-out multiphase microreactors

Experiments and modeling on bubble uniformity of Taylor flow in T-junction microchannel

“…Those non-uniform bubbles with uneven sizes and surface areas will jeopardize a precise control of heat transfer, mass transfer and reaction in microchannels and microreactors (Houshmand and Peles, 2014;Sobieszuk et al, 2011), and will lead to a lower conversion rate (Al-Rawashdeh et al, 2013) and an inaccurate measurement of reaction kinetics (Li et al, 2012). Moreover, this undesirable phenomenon will also cause disordered splits (Hoang et al, 2014), coalescence (Wu et al, 2014) and array storage (Xu et al, 2013) for microfluidic. Therefore, bubble uniformity is critical to taking advantage of Taylor flow in microreactors and microfluidics, and the acceptable deviation of bubble size normally is smaller than 5-10% in practice (Fries et al, 2008;Yue et al, 2008aYue et al, , 2008bAl-Rawashdeh et al, 2013).…”

Uniformity of gas and liquid two phases flowing through two microchannels in parallel

“…Finally, the segmented flows can be obtained with a relative uniform bubble volume and bubble spacing in all channels on the conditions that breakup happens at all junctions and asymmetries in flow are minimized [7,8]. Recently, Hoang et al [9] found http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2014. 11.004 1385-8947/Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.…”

Numerical investigation of bubble breakup in a four‐branched microchannel based on non‐Newtonian pseudoplastic fluid

“…Chen et al 14 elucidated the flow dynamics of gas-liquid two-phase flow splitting in microchannel junctions and found that the liquid taken off from the branch does not decrease with increasing of branch angle for all kinds of inlet flow patterns. Subsequently, to accelerate the scale-out of bubble-based microreactors, Hoang et al 21 proposed a multistage Tjunctions model for the even distribution of bubbles on the premise that the capillary number at the last generation of T-junctions was larger than the critical capillary number to ensure that all bubbles break and confirmed that a bypass channel had a beneficial effect to larger fabrication tolerances through theoretical and experimental analysis. Rocha et al 16 addressed parametrically in the isolated Taylor bubbles flowing in cocurrent with liquid millichannel and microchannel.…”

“…Yue 20 designed sixteen parallel microchannels to investigate flow distribution and mass transfer characteristics during carbon dioxide-water flow and found a nearly uniform gas-liquid distribution at high-gas velocities where the ideal flow pattern was slug-annular flow. Subsequently, to accelerate the scale-out of bubble-based microreactors, Hoang et al 21 proposed a multistage Tjunctions model for the even distribution of bubbles on the premise that the capillary number at the last generation of T-junctions was larger than the critical capillary number to ensure that all bubbles break and confirmed that a bypass channel had a beneficial effect to larger fabrication tolerances through theoretical and experimental analysis.…”