Impact of mixer design to reactants mixing characteristics and gas-phase reactions in the mixing region of a hydrocarbon reformer

개질기 혼합영역 형상에 따른 반응물의 혼합도 및 가스상 반응특성에 대한 수치해석적 연구

Reactant mixing has a critical role in ensuring reformate quality and an important design objective is to achieve sufficiently complete mixture of reactants. For that purpose it is required to understand the coupled transport-kinetics phenomena in the mixing region. Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model was developed and validated in previous works. The mixing characteristics in various alternatives of a prototype mixing chamber were compared, and then a reduced reaction kinetics was applied to two extreme designs for investigating the impact of gas-phase reactions. Both designs did not reach threshold ethylene mole fraction of 0.001, but surprisingly more ethylene was generated in the design having better mixing characteristics. The presentation will deliver the development process of coupled transport and kinetics model briefly and the detailed information about the mixing characteristics and gas-phase reactions in two mixer designs.