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

Harkou, E; Hafeez, S; Manos, G; Constantinou, A; (2021) CFD Study of the Numbering up of Membrane Microreactors for CO2 Capture. Processes , 9 (9) , Article 1515. 10.3390/pr9091515. Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Article
Title: CFD Study of the Numbering up of Membrane Microreactors for CO2 Capture
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3390/pr9091515
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3390/pr9091515
Language: English
Additional information: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
Keywords: CO2 capture; membrane; microreactor; numbering up; CFD
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Chemical Engineering
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10133742
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