Numerical investigation of near-critical fluid convective flow mixing in microchannels

作者：Chen, Lin; Zhang, Xin-Rong^*; Okajima, Junnosuke; Maruyama, Shigenao

来源：Chemical Engineering Science, 2013, 97: 67-80.

DOI：10.1016/j.ces.2013.04.010

• Near-critical fluid
• Thermodynamics process
• Microchannel
• Numerical analysis
• Fluid mechanics
• Mixing

Supercritical CO2 fluid has been widely used in chemical extraction, chemical synthesis, micro-manufacturing and heat transfer apparatus, and so forth. The current study deals with near-critical CO2 microchannel mixing flow and its basic characteristics. Careful numerical investigations are carried out by solving the coupled computational fluid dynamic equations. The results show that strong near-critical vortex flows can be achieved in a relatively wide range of initial and controlling conditions in microchannels. Basic, isothermally developed flows are simulated and then used as the initial state for a heat convective simulation. After the wall heat flux is applied, the vortex mixing flow originates from the hot boundaries in microchannels with height D=100 mu m to 200 mu m, while natural convection will gradually become dominant for microchannels with D=300 mu m to 500 mu m. The current micro-mixing evolution can be ascribed to a novel type of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Well-correlated characteristic numbers are identified for the effective near-critical microchannel mixing cases. The vortex growth and evolution mode in microchannels are found to differ greatly from previous micro-mixing methods. Possible applications in micro-engineering/chemical process are also discussed in this study.

• 出版日期2013-6-28
• 单位北京大学