Kinetic Modeling of Nanoprecipitation using CFD Coupled with a Population Balance

A model study has been conducted for Flash Nanoprecipitation (FNP)—a novel approach to produce functional nanoparticles. A population balance equation with the FNP kinetics has been integrated into a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of a custom-designed microscale multi-inlet vortex reactor (MIVR) to yield conditions comparable to the real experimental settings. In coping with the complicated aggregation model in the CFD code, a new numerical approach, the conditional quadrature method of moments (CQMOM), has been proposed, which is capable of solving the multivariate system efficiently and accurately. It is shown that the FNP process is highly influenced by mixing effects in the microreactor, and thus coupling CFD with the kinetics model is essential in obtaining valid comparisons with experiments.