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Scale‐up of Capillary Extraction Equipment
Author(s) -
Mendorf Matthias,
Agar David W.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
chemie ingenieur technik
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.365
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1522-2640
pISSN - 0009-286X
DOI - 10.1002/cite.201100026
Subject(s) - microscale chemistry , capillary action , slug flow , process engineering , flow (mathematics) , fabrication , mass transfer , multiphase flow , two phase flow , extraction (chemistry) , viscosity , computer science , materials science , capillary number , exploit , microfluidics , mechanics , chromatography , nanotechnology , chemistry , engineering , mathematics , physics , medicine , mathematics education , alternative medicine , pathology , composite material , computer security
In order to fully exploit the outstanding mass transfer characteristics of liquid‐liquid slug flow in capillaries for technical extraction processes, it is necessary to employ numbering‐up to retain the underlying benefits of microscale operation. For optimal performance, each of the parallelized capillaries should be operated at the same flow rate, a similar phase ratio and with a single, uniform slug structure. Since the fabrication tolerances of microstructures make it difficult to construct distributors generating the uniform multiphase flow sought, a simple and affordable scheme for monitoring and regulating the slug flow in individual capillaries has been developed. The concept was implemented successfully for both simple aqueous‐organic biphasic flows and with more challenging systems exhibiting flow multiplicities as a consequence of viscosity changes.