PEC12-25 CAPEC-PROCESS Industrial Consortium ... - DTU Orbit

needed for solvent-based separations; saturation diagrams for solid solubility; controlled
release predictions for product delivery; and many more.
PROCESS: Mastering process intensification across scales with help of
microtechnology and computational fluid dynamics
Microtechnology has attractd increasing attention over the last years within many research
areas. Chemical Engineers are also discovering more and more the opportunities that
miniaturized systems offer and therefore it is expected that microtechnology will soon find
its way from academia to industry. Microtechnology is based on Microsystems that,
i) use minitue amounts of precious reactants,
ii) have favorable kinetic characteristics,
iii) have superior heat transfer abilities, which allow quasi adiabatic reactions,
iv) allow the performance of physically difficult experiements, which cannot be
established in normal scaled experiments.
One issue in microfluidic applications is that it should be possible to calculate the fluid
dynamic conditions, for example, with the help of computational fluid dynamic methods
and the prediction accuracy of such numerical simulations should be of high quality under
laminar flow conditions. In this way, the mathematical complexity of the model
formulation is reduced to the solution of the Navier Stokes equation and no turbulence
models need to be considered. In Fig 1.4 typical laminar flow conditions are presented in a
simulation (a) and an experimental setup (b).
Figure 1.4: (a) CFD simulation of diffusion based mixing in interdigitated microchannels;
(b) experimental realisation of the inlet region of a miniaturized reactor
Within PROCESS, the ojective is to develop microtechnology based processes, which use
the advantage of micro scaled fluid dynamic properties and their influence on chemical,
biochemical and physical interactions. A special emphasis is the integration of different
unit operations into a single step process, avoiding such the accumulation of inefficiencies
of serial performed processes.
The use of CFD methods coupled with, for example, structured models furhtermore help to
predict the process intensification performance across the scales and are placed at the heart
of the CAPEC-PROCESS research activities. These activities are acompanied by the use of
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