Oscillatory Flow Reactor Three-dimensional Flow Field Asymmetry Cfd Quantitative Study

Oscillatory flow reactor (OFR) is one new kind of chemical processing equipment with great potential in industries, possessing good transport characters, and can be easily controlled. Presently, study of OFR remains at the stage of lab or primary usage.With the fast development of computer science, computational simulation has become the parallel useful tool with experiments in lab, and has been employed in all walks of industrials. Computational simulation of the flow field in OFR can supply new information which experiments in lab cannot, and reduce the cost of study.With the help of commercial computational fluid dynamics software of CFX, numerical simulation of 3-D flow fields in OFR with perfect boundary conditions, slight eccentricity of baffles and bias of oscillatory boundary was carried out. Structured grid was employed to discretize the space in OFR, Navier-Stokes equation was solved by use of finite volume methods and the problem of pressure correction with SIMPLE algorithm.On base of computational simulation of 3-D flow fields in OFR, physical property of RMDV (Relative mean differencing value) was brought up for the first time to measure the asymmetry of flow fields in OFR, which pushed CFD simulation of OFR from qualitative stage to quantitative stage.The velocity values of centrally symmetric grids in OFR were taken out using professional visualizing software of FieldView and were statistical analyzed with Matlab, after which we got the values of RMDV (Relative mean difference value).The results show that RMDV is a useful way to measure the asymmetry of 3-D flow fields in OFR, the values of RMDV with three kinds of boundary conditions change periodically with time and the geometrical boundaries have great effects on flow fields in OFR.The computational simulations supply new information to learn and understand the flow pattern of 3-D flow fields in OFR and contribute to geometrical optimization and industrial design of OFR, which lays good foundation for further study of it. The study of OFR can explode to computational simulation of multi-cells, particle-pervasion; remain time distribution and chemical reactions in OFR.