CFD Study of the Numbering up of Membrane Microreactors for CO2 Capture

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the major atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHG). The continuous increase of CO2 concentration and its long atmospheric lifetime may cause long-term negative effects on the climate. It is important to develop technologies to capture and minimize those emissions into the at...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProcesses Vol. 9; no. 9; p. 1515
Main Authors Harkou, Eleana, Hafeez, Sanaa, Manos, George, Constantinou, Achilleas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.09.2021
Subjects
Atmospheric models
Carbon dioxide
Carbon sequestration
Climate effects
Emissions
Flow distribution
Gas absorption
Gas flow
Greenhouse gases
Inserts
Investigations
Liquid flow
Membrane separation
Membranes
Microreactors
Reactors
Reynolds number
Simulation
Uniform flow
Velocity
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Summary:Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the major atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHG). The continuous increase of CO2 concentration and its long atmospheric lifetime may cause long-term negative effects on the climate. It is important to develop technologies to capture and minimize those emissions into the atmosphere. The objective of this work is to design and study theoretically and experimentally a numbering-up/scale-out membrane microreactor in order to be used as a capture system. The main aim of the work is to obtain an even flow distribution at each plate of the reactor. Nearly uniform flow distribution was achieved at each layer of the numbering-up microreactor according to the carried-out CFD models. The maximum difference between the average velocities was less than 6% for both gas and liquid flows. To obtain better flow distribution into the microreactor, the radius of the inlet/outlet tube was optimized. Results from CFD and experimental simulations do not match, and slightly maldistribution in achieved in the experimental system due to phase breakthrough and imperfections on the fabrication of the plates. Moreover, comparing the single channel microreactor to the scale-out microreactor, the latter showed poorer performance on CO2 removal while expecting the reactors to have similar performance. By installing inserts with different channel widths, the experimental results were identical to the original case.
ISSN:2227-9717
2227-9717
DOI:10.3390/pr9091515