Two-phase flow and mass transfer in microchannels: A review from local mechanism to global models

By Chaoqun Yao, Yuchao Zhao, Haiyun Ma, Yanyan Liu, Qiankun Zhao, Guangwen Chen. 2021

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Microreaction technology is preferential in process intensification and chemical synthesis, especially in multiphase applications. A thorough understanding of the hydrodynamics and mass transfer is the pre-requisite for implementing such applications. This review discusses the recent progress on the flow and mass transfer of two-phase systems in microchannels, in a multi-scale view from local mechanism to global behavior. The flow patterns, the formation of bubbles/droplets, and the manipulation of bubbles/droplets are presented and discussed in detail. The mass transfer aspects include the velocity profile and mixing inside droplets/slugs, as well as the interfacial mass transfer mechanism and simulative models. The aim of the review is to show directly the physical ingredients which determine the transport phenomena, help explain the observed behavior, and guide reactor design. To simplify the physical ingredients, the attention is focused on straight channels while phenomena in other channels (e.g., meandering channel) are neglected.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/203e19322cd9c01ec24e69399f900a0f3d570c14