Development of liquid-phase agitated reactors: Synthesis, simulation, and scaleup

A systematic procedure is formulated for the development of liquid-phase agitated reactors. The procedure has three components: synthesis, simulation, and scaleup. Synthesis leads the user to the reactor geometry, agitator type and speed, number and location of feed addition ports, feed addition or residence time, and heat-transfer policy that would achieve the desired performance objectives. It is based on an analysis of the interplay of reaction and mixing at various length scales, and a knowledge base of the capacities of heat-transfer equipment. Simulation assesses the performance of the reactors thus synthesized, taking into account detailed flow properties obtained through computational fluid dynamic simulations, experimental data, or a combination of both. Scaleup provides fundamentally based scaleup rules for direct development of these reactors from laboratory scale to production scale. A comparison of these derived scaleup rules with published empirical rules reveals the underlying physics, applicability, and limitations of these empirical rules. Three examples are presented to illustrate the use of this procedure.