Falling Film Flow Of Viscoelastic Fluid On Slit Elements With Supporting Wires

Grid Falling Film Tower (GFFT) is a novel high efficient polycondensation reactor. In the reactor, polymer melt flows through multi-stage slit film-forming elements with supporting wires from top to bottom to form falling film owing to gravity. As the quickly increasing of melt viscoelasticity in continuous polycondensation process, the structures of film-forming elements, including the width of slit and distance between wires, must be changed along the reactor to achieve good film flow and high filming efficiency. In this paper, the effect of fluid elasticity on the hydrodynamics performance of slit film-forming elements has been focused by using syrup solutions mixed with polyacrylamide as mock-up experimental media, whose viscoelastic properties could be controlled by the mixing ratio of water and polyacrylamide. And the elasticity of solutions under low shear rate has been characterized by Weissenberg number (Wi), which has been simplified at G'<