Mixing-Time in T-Mixer Reactor

Abstract

The mixing of fluids at micro-scale is one of the most important operations in the development of micro-fluid systems for applications in chemical and biochemical engineering, biomedical systems. Attaining rapid mixing is a challenging task because mixing mainly relies on molecular diffusion across the interface of the fluid stream in micro channels. The geometry of the T-mixer with non-coaxial inputs in which the reagents are mixed can have a great influence on the distribution of nanoparticle products (on the preparation of homogeneous and monodisperse nanoparticles). The T-mixer is designed in such a way that the entering jet forms a vortex and generates a turbulent swirling flow: the fluid velocity profile presents an instant formation of a vortex in the fluid contact area. The vortex package consists of elementary vortices of both reagents, the size of which depends on the amount of energy injected into the system. This article focuses on the experimental validation of our numerical model of the T-mixer, by measuring the height (Z_i) for obtaining this micro-mixing. For the numerical model, we used the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate fluid flow in the T-mixer with the k-ε turbulence model using Ansys Fluent software. Numerical and experimental values of Z_i mixing converge.