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International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 114 (2017) 83–89

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International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s ev i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / i j h m t

Experimental investigation on gas-liquid mass transfer with fast chemical


reaction in microchannel

Chunying Zhu a, Yutao Lu a, Taotao Fu a, Youguang Ma a, , Huai Z. Li b
a
State Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin
University, Tianjin 300072, PR China
b
Laboratory of Reactions and Process Engineering, University of Lorraine, CNRS, 1, rue Grandville, BP 20451, 54001 Nancy cedex, France

article info abstract

Article history: The gas-liquid two-phase flow and mass transfer with fast chemical reaction in a microchannel were investigated
Received 9 June 2017 experimentally. Result showed that the bubble volume decreased exponentially with its movement along the channel in a
Accepted 12 June 2017 quickly reactable absorbent. The volumetric mass transfer coefficient k La increased with gas flow rate, while it was insensitive
to liquid flow rate under experimental condi-tions, although the mass transfer coefficient k L increased with liquid flow rate. In
slug-bubbly flow regime, the kL decreased when increasing gas flow rate, but inverse tendency was found for slug flow pat-
Keywords:
Microchannel tern. Both kL and kLa increased with the increase of absorbent concentration. A new correlation for pre-dicting the volumetric
Mass transfer mass transfer coefficients kLa was proposed by taking the enhancement factor E of chemical reaction into account.
Gas-liquid two-phase flow
Chemical absorption
2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Yue et al. [3] investigated the absorption of oxygen in the deion-ized
water, but the experimental volumetric mass transfer coeffi-cients were less
In recent years, microfluidic technology has been widely applied in many evidently than the prediction values of Bercic and Pintar [1] and van Baten et
industrial fields such as chemical, material, biol-chemical, pharmaceutical and al. [2]. Yue et al. [3] argued that the mass transfer between the liquid film and
food engineering, etc., due to its excellent mass and heat transfer liquid slug was mostly stemmed from the diffusion without the convective
performances. The systematical investigation on the mass transfer mechanism mixing, thereby the mixture between the liquid film and liquid slug was
inside microchannel is of critical importance for the design and optimization incomplete due to the short diffusive time for the short liquid slug. Moreover,
of the microreactor. the dissolution rate of CO2 bubble into water also was experimentally
investigated [4,5].
Bercic et al. [1] investigated the absorption of methane into water in
capillaries under Taylar flow regime. They found that the volumetric mass The analysis on the mechanism of mass transfer between gas and liquid
transfer coefficient relies mainly on the length and velocity of liquid slug, and phases under the Taylor flow has been implemented through a bubble and
the contribution of mass transfer in the liquid film is inapparent. following liquid slug [6,7]. Kreutzer et al.
[6] thought that the mass transfer could be divided into three dif-ferent steps:
van Baten et al. [2] suggested that the mass transfer coefficient was a sum (1) From the bubble directly to the liquid film, (2) from the bubble to the
of two contributions: bubble caps and liquid film sur-rounding the bubble. A vortex region in the liquid slug, (3) from
criterion of Fo number (Fo = D/(t filmd2film), D is the diffusivity of liquid the vortex region to the liquid film.
phase, tfilm the contact time of liquid film with Taylor gas bubble, and dfilm Sobieszuk et al. [8] investigated the mass transfer of CO2/N2 absorption
the thickness of film sur-rounding buble.) was proposed to judge the into KHCO3/K2CO3 solution and determined the mass transfer coefficients
contribution of the mass transfer. If Fo < 0.1, both the bubble caps and the for bubble caps (kL,cap) and liquid film (kL,film), respectively. They found
film region were important; if Fo > 1, the contribution of the bubble caps was
that the values of kL,cap and kL,film were mutually approximate. Yao et al. [9]
dominant due to the saturation of liquid film region.
investigated the flow and mass transfer of CO2-water system under elevated
pressures in a microchannel. On the basis of the dissolution rate of gas
bubbles, the mass transfer coefficients were calculated using a unit cell
⇑ Corresponding author. model. The difference of dissolution rates in the main channel at
E-mail address: ygma@tju.edu.cn (Y. Ma).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2017.06.054 0017-
9310/ 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
84 C. Zhu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 114 (2017) 83–89

different flow rates was very little for a short contact distance. In addition, Aladdin, China) solution were feeded into the gas and liquid inlets of the
many reseachers [10–12] have found that the mass trans-fer during the microchannel, respectively. After the flow stabilized about 5 min for a new
formation stage of bubbles is relatively large in the total mass transfer experimental condition, the formation and move-ment of the bubble in
process. microchannel were recorded by a high-speed digital camera (MotionPro Y5,
Mikaelian et al. [13,14] studied the gas-liquid mass transfer of spherical IDT, USA) at 2000 frames per second. The pressure of gas phase at inlet was
measured by a piezometer (ST3000, Honeywell, USA. The precision is
bubbles in square and circular microchannels through CFD analysis, and
found the recirculation between two successive bubbles. Furthermore, they 0.02%), and the pressure at outlet is atmospheric pressure. CO2 was used as
proposed a model for describing the dissolution of a chain of spherical pure the dispersed phase and a series of NaOH aqueous solutions with 0.3wt%
gas bubbles into a non-volatile liquid. Jia and Zhang [15] numeically sodium dodecyl sulfate were used as the continuous phase. The density q,
investigated the mass transfer of Taylor flow in a microfluidic T-junction viscosity lL and surface tension r of solution were measured respectively
using three-dimensional Volume of Fluid, and found the vortices in both the using densimeter (DMA4500, Anton Paar, Austria), automatic ubbelohde
concentration and velocity fields in the liquid slug. In addition, the simulation viscometer (iVisc, LAUDA, Germany) and ten-siometer (OCA15ECm Data
results showed that the mass transfer through the thin liquid film around the Physics Instruments GmbH, Germany) at 293.15 K, and the data were given
in Table 1. The experiments were carried out at 293.15 ± 1 K and atmosphere
Taylor bubble was dominant during the dissolution, and the dominance
gradually disappeared with the increase of the liquid film thickness, the pressure, the ranges of QG and QL are separately (10–320) mL h 1 and (20–
maximum of mass transfer rate appeared at the top end of the caps in the cap 80) mL h 1 for mass transfer, and QL with (10–80) mL h 1 for flow pattern.
region.

Up to now, many efforts have been devoted to the research on gas-liquid


mass transfer in the microchannel [16–18]. However, the understanding on
the mechanism of mass transfer in microflu-idic device remains still far from
sufficient, especially in the system involving chemical reaction. In this paper, 3. Results and discussion
the mass transfer between gas-liquid two phases with fast chemical reaction
3.1. Evolution of the bubble volume
was mainly concerned. Experiments of CO2-NaOH aqueous solution two-
phase flow were conducted in a square microchannel. The evolution of bubble
Three main flow regimes were observed as shown in Fig. 2: bubbly
volume along the microchannel was recorded. Furthermore, the overall liquid
regime, slug regime and slug-annular regime, analogous to those reported by
mass transfer coefficients and the overall liquid volumetric mass transfer Cubaud [4,20]. However, the slug flow could evolve into bubbly flow along
coefficients were deter-mined to investigate the mass transfer performance of the microchannel due to the fast absorption as shown in Fig. 2b. Cubaud [4]
the whole microchannel, and a correlation, considering the enhancement
also observed the evo-lution of dissolving CO2 bubble in water using long
factor E of chemical reaction on mass transfer, was proposed to predict the
volumetric mass transfer coefficients. serpentine microchannels. This indicated the absorption played a key role on
the gas-liquid two-phase flow.

When the bubbles in the channel are less than the channel width, the
regime is named as bubbly flow, and the bubble could be regarded as a
2. Experiment sphere. When the bubbles in the channel are lar-ger than the channel width,
the regime is slug flow, and the slug bubble includes two semispheroid ends
As shown in Fig. 1, a square cross-section microchannel with depth 400 and a body. In our exper-imental, the capillary number Ca = lLu/r, (u is
lm, width 400 lm and length 40 mm was adopted in the experiment. The superficial velocity of gas-liquid flow, u = (QG + QL)/w2, w is the width of
channel was fabricated in a polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) plate, and then
channel) is less than 0.003, thus we assume that the cross section of slug bub-
sealed with another PMMA plate by screws. The gas flow rate QG and liquid ble body is approximately flat on the side regions and constant curve with
flow rate QL were controlled respectively by pumps (PHD 2000, Harvard radius r in the corners in square microchannel [21], and its area was 90% of
Apparatus, America. The accuracy is ±0.35%.). cross section of microchannel [22]. The vol-ume VB and surface area AB of a
slug bubble could be separately cal-culated by:
The CO2 (the mass fraction purity 99%, Tianjin Liufang Gas Station,
China) and NaOH (the mass fraction purity is 99.4%,

VB ¼ pw3=6 þ 0:9w2ðlB wÞ ð1Þ

AB ¼ pw2 þ ½2pr þ 4ðw 2rÞ&ðlB wÞ ð2Þ


r w pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi14010 p 3
¼ ð Þ ðÞ
where lB is the length of bubble, which is obtained from the image recorded
by the high-speed digital camera using the software MATLAB, and the
average bubble length of at least three images was used to calculate the area
and volume of bubble. The relative error of lB is 2%.

Experiment in this work showed that the bubble volume decreases


exponentially and finally approaches to zero except QG = 100 mL h 1 with the
movement of bubble in microchannel as shown in Fig. 3. With the increase of
gas flow rate QG, the vol-ume of bubbles formed at inlet of microchannel (t =
0) increases. The pressure drops for experiments in Fig. 3 are (0.46, 0.73,
1.06, 1.43 and 1.81) kPa, respectively. The effect of pressure on volume was
negligible.
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the experiment setup.
C. Zhu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 114 (2017) 83–89 85

Table 1 Because the specific area a = A/Vt, Eq. (7) could be written as:
Physical properties of NaOH solutions.
dng
q/ lL/ r/ 104 He/
3
(g cm ) (mN m ) 1 3
(mol m Pa ) 1a dt ¼ VtkLaðCe CÞ ð8Þ
(mPa s)
0.2 mol L 1
1.00688 1.068 33.36 4.16 where Vt is the volume of microchannel, kLa is the overall liquid vol-umetric
0.4 mol L 1 1.01551 1.113 32.18 4.45 mass transfer coefficient for the whole microchannel. In the experiment, the
0.8 mol L 1 1.03213 1.209 30.72 5.07 absorbent was sufficient, and the values of Hatta
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
a Henry coefficient He was calculated according to Ref. [19].
number Ha (Ha ¼ k2cD=kc , k2 is the reaction rate constant, D the diffusivity
of CO2 in liquid, kc is the liquid-side mass transfer coef-ficient of CO2 in
solvent without chemical absorption.) are larger than 3 for the reaction of
3.2. Mass transfer coefficient CO2 and NaOH solution used in this work. Thus the reaction could be
considered to be a fast irreversible reac-tion, and thus the concentration of
For gas-liquid interphase mass transfer of the absorption pro-cess of pure carbon dioxide in the liquid was ignorable, that is C = 0 [11].
gas, the gas-film resistance is negligible according to two-film theory of
Whitman et al. [23] hence the mass transfer efficiency of carbon dioxide into dng
sodium hydroxide aqueous solu-tion depends only on the liquid film [24]. The
dt ¼ VtkLaCe ð9Þ
mass transfer flux N could be written as:
Integrating Eq. (9):

N ¼ kLðCe CÞ ð4Þ Dng ¼ VtkLaCet ð10Þ


where kL is the overall liquid mass transfer coefficient for the whole where Ce could be determined by:
microchannel, Ce is the equilibrium concentration of CO2 with liquid which
is assumed to equal the concentration of solute at the inter-face between the Ce ¼ pHe ð11Þ
gas and liquid phases, C is the concentration of CO2 in liquid bulk.

For the gas-liquid mass transfer in microchannel, the mass con-servation


could be given:
1 dng
N ¼ A dt ð5Þ
m
X
A¼ AB;i ð6Þ
i¼1

where A is the interfacial area between the gas-liquid two-phase for the whole
microchannel, and it could be considered as a constant for a given
experimental condition, m is the number of bubble in the microchannel, n g is
molar quantity of carbon dioxide absorbed into the liquid, t is time.

From Eqs. (4) and (5):


dng Fig. 3. Effect of operating condition on the evolution of the bubble volume with time. QL = 20
dt ¼ AkLðCe CÞ ð7Þ mL h 1, c = 0.8 mol L 1.

Fig. 2. Flow patterns of gas-liquid two-phase flow accompanying with mass transfer (c is initial concentration of NaOH in solution.).
86 C. Zhu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 114 (2017) 83–89

p is the average pressure at inlet and outlet of the microchannel, He is Henry


coefficient calculated according to the literature [19].
For all experiments, the pressure in the microchannel is less than two
atmospheres, and then the molar quantities of carbon dioxide getting into and
out microchannel within t could be sepa-rately determined as following:

pinVgeft
Dnin ¼ RT ð12Þ

poutVoutft
Dnout ¼ RT ð13Þ
Then the overall molar quantity of carbon dioxide absorbed into liquid
within t is:

n ðpinVge poutVoutÞft 14
D g¼ RT ð Þ Fig. 5. Effect of operating conditions on kL (concentration of NaOH c = 0.8 mol L 1). The
dashed line is the transition between bubbly regime and slug-bubbly regime; the solid line is the
where pin and pout are the pressure in the inlet and outlet of the microchannel,
transition between slug-bubbly regime and slug regime. The insets depict bubbles in the inlet
respectively. Vout is the volume of the bubble in the outlet of the and outlet of microchannel, respectively.
microchannel. f is the formation frequency of the bub-ble. Vge is the
theoretical formation volume of the bubble without absorption at the same
condition, and it can be calculated by: rising liquid flow rate, it is much different from the results in the literature.
QG Tan et al. [25] observed that kLa increased evidently with the increase of the
Vge ¼ f ð15Þ gas and liquid flow rate. Yue et al. [3] also found that kLa increased with the
Taking the Eq. (14) into the Eq. (10): increase of the liquid slug length. How-ever, Li et al. [26] found that, with the
increase of the liquid flow rate, kLa decreased for small gas flow rate, but
ka ðpinVge poutVoutÞf 16 increase when the gas flow rate reached a critical flow rate. The discrepancy
between literature and present experiment could be attributed to the differ-
L ¼ VtCeRT ð Þ
ence of materials and operating conditions. In principle, there exist two
Then kL could be calculated by:
inverse effects of the liquid flow rate on the mass transfer: (1) The increase of
k ðpinVge poutVoutÞf 17 liquid flow rate could lead to long liquid slug and contact time between liquid
slug and liquid film, also it could pro-mote the convection mass transfer in
L¼ ACeRT ð Þ liquid slug, these would increase the volume mass transfer coefficient; (2)
The errors of kLa and kL were estimated as 5%. The kLa and kL for The increase of liquid flow rate would lead to a decrease in specific interfacial
bubbly flow, slug-bubbly flow and slug flow were obtained from images area. Therefore the volume mass transfer coefficient decreases. As a result, a
recorded by high-speed digital camera in the ranges of QG (10–320) mL h 1 completive result of above the two kinds of influences would lead to different
and QL (20–80) mL h 1. The values of k La, kL and a were listed in Table S1 effects of liquid flow rate on the volume mass transfer coefficient.
in Supplementary Material.

3.2.1. Effect of gas and liquid flow rate


The effects of gas and liquid flow rates on the volumetric mass transfer The evolution of kL with the operating condition is shown in Fig. 5. The
coefficient kLa are shown in Fig. 4. For a fixed liquid flow rate, the kLa changing tendency of kL with gas flow rate is different from that of the kLa. It
increases with the gas flow rate QG. This could be attributed to the increase of could be seen that kL firstly decreases and then increases with the increase of
interfacial area and intensification of mass transfer between bubble and liquid the gas flow rate, which is dif-ferent with results in the literature [3,12,25].
due to the rise of recircu-lation in the liquid [13,15]. In addition, the kLa The critical gas flow rates QGC are found to be coincident with the transition
appears insensitive to the liquid flow rate although the liquid slug increases
of flow pat-tern. When QG < QGC, the mass transfer coefficient decreases
when
with the increase of QG, but it would be inverse if QG > QGC.
The mass transfer between bubble and liquid mainly includes that from
bubble caps to liquid slug (kL,cap) and from bubble body to liquid film
between bubble and microchannel wall (k L,film). The mass transfer
coefficient under the bubbly regime are greater than that under the slug-
bubbly regime and slug regime, implying that the kL,cap is beyond kL,film.

With rising gas flow rate, the bubble volume would increase, while the
ratio of the interfacial area of bubble caps to the total interfacial area between
bubble and liquid in the microchannel would decline. Meanwhile, the
residence time of the bubble on the liquid film would be certainly
prolongated. These would pro-mote the saturation of liquid film. Therefore,
the total mass trans-fer coefficient decreases. In addition, the increase in gas
flow rate also would lead to a faster movement of bubble and liquid slug,
which could accelerate the recirculation in liquid to intensify the mass transfer
[27]. Therefore, with the increase of gas flow rate, the mass transfer
coefficient gradually decreases under the slug-bubbly regime, but increases
under the slug regime. Tan et al.
Fig. 4. Effect of gas and liquid flow rates on the volumetric mass transfer coefficient
(concentration of NaOH c = 0.8 mol L 1).
C. Zhu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 114 (2017) 83–89 87

[25] also observed the decrease of kL with the increase of the gas flow rate.

It is noteworthy that the variation of k L with QG is gradually flat-tening


with the increase of QL. When the liquid flow rate increases, the movement
velocity of bubble would increase but the bubble volume would decrease, and
the flow regime would evolve gradu-ally from slug flow to bubbly flow as
shown in Fig. 2. The ratio of the interfacial area of bubble caps to the total
interfacial area
between bubble and liquid in the microchannel would increase. Consequently,
the kL would gradually approach to the kL,cap. There-fore, at high liquid flow
rates, the effect of gas flow rate on mass transfer coefficient would decline
(Fig. 5). Moreover, the increase
in liquid flow rate could lead to a decrease in the initial bubble vol-ume as
shown in Fig. 2, thus the critical gas flow rate QGC for the transition from
slug-bubbly regime to slug regime would increase.
Fig. 7. Effect of chemical reaction rate on kL (QL = 40 ml h 1). The solid line is transition
3.2.2. Effect of chemical reaction rate between the slug-bubbly and slug regime. The insets depict the bubbles in the inlet and outlet of
The influences of chemical reaction rate on the volume mass transfer microchannel, respectively.
coefficient and mass transfer coefficient are illustrated in Figs. 6 and 7,
respectively. Under higher chemical reaction rate, the CO2 absorbed into the liquid mass transfer coefficient increases. In addition, the crit-ical flow
liquid could rapidly react with NaOH, hence the reaction location would shift
rate QGC for the transition of flow pattern also increase correspondingly as
toward the interface of gas-liquid two-phase, as a result, the concentration
shown in Fig. 7.
gradient of CO2 near the interface increases and the liquid film resistance
becomes weak-ened, consequently, leading to an increase in the mass transfer
3.3. Correlation of the mass transfer coefficient
coefficient. Therefore, the chemical reaction has an intensification role on the
gas-liquid mass transfer. However, faster chemical reaction could result in a
Considering the effects of fluid property and flow condition on the mass
quickly shrinking in bubble volume shown Fig. 2, which brought about a
transfer coefficient, Yue et al. [29] proposted a dimen-sionless correlation for
decrease in gas-liquid two-phase contact area and an increase in the residence
time of the fluid unit in microchannel, this could cause an weakening in gas- the absorption of carbon dioxide into the deionized water for slug flow as
liquid mass transfer. The apparent influence of chemical reaction on gas- following:
liquid mass transfer depends on the competition of above two opposed
impacting factors. From Figs. 6 and 7 it could be seen that, both volume mass ShLadH ¼ 0:084ReL0:973ReG0:213Sc0:5 ð18Þ
transfer coefficient and mass transfer coef-ficient increase with the increase of where the Sherwood number is defined as Sh L = kLdH/D (dH is the hydraulic
NaOH concentration namely the chemical reaction rate, indicating that the
diameter, and D is diffusivity of CO2 in solution.), the Sch-midt number of
intensification of chemical reaction is predominant during the gas-liquid
interphase mass transfer process. The result is concordant with the literature liquid phase is defined as Sc = lL/qLD (lL and qL are viscosity and density of
[28]. liquid, respectively.) the Reynolds number of gas phase is defined as ReG ¼
qGdHUG=lG (lG and qG are viscosity and density of gas, respectively.), the
Reynolds number of liquid phase is defined as ReL ¼ qLdHUL=lL.
Subsequently, this method was also used by Niu et al. [30] and Su et al. [31]
Logically, when the chemical reaction rate increases, the bubble length at to predict mass transfer coefficient.
outlet of the microchannel becomes shortened but the total bubble number in
In this experiment, the intensification of fast chemical reaction on mass
microchannel grows up as shown in Fig. 2, consequently, the interfacial area
transfer is dominant, thus the enhancement factor E of chemical reaction on
between bubble caps and liquid slug becomes increased. Moreover, the quick
mass transfer is introduced, which is defined as the ratio of absorption rate
shrink of bubble would enhance the recirculation in liquid to intensify the
with chemical reaction to that of physical absorption. According to the film
mass transfer for high concentration NaOH solution [15]. Thus
theory, the enhance-ment factor E for fast irreversible chemical reaction could
be theo-retically calculated by following equation [32]:

Dc
E ¼ 1 þ DNaOHCe ð19Þ

where D is the diffusivity of CO2 in NaOH aqueous solution


(1.73 10 9 m2 s 1 [19]), DNaOH is the diffusivity of NaOH in solu-tion (4.5 10
9 m2 s 1 [33]).
The predicted correlation of volumetric mass transfer coeffi-
cient is achieved with enhancement factor as following:

ShLadH ¼ m1ReLm2 ReGm3 Em4 Sc0:5 ð20Þ


where m1, m2, m3 and m4 are fitting parameters, and their values respectively
are 1.6609, 0.03386, 0.9178 and 0.1725 through fitting the experimental data
for slug-bubbly and slug regimes. The value of m2 is small due to the
insensitivity of kLa on liquid flow rate in our experimental results, which has
been discussed in Section 3.2.1. The average deviation of predicting volume
Fig. 6. Effect of chemical reaction rate on kLa (QL = 40 ml h 1). mass transfer
88 C. Zhu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 114 (2017) 83–89

Appendix A. Supplementary material

Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online
version, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstrans-fer.2017.06.054.

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