Numerical modeling of heat and mass transfer using nanofluid in a tubular reactor

Abstract

Chemical reactions occur everywhere in our everyday life, for example, in the human body, in cell phone batteries, in a rocket engine and in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry. Optimizing chemical reactors, filtration equipment, mixers, and other processes is made easy with the chemical reaction engineering. In this researchthe model provides a study of an elementary, exothermic, 2nd-order reversible reaction in a tubular reactor (liquid phase, laminar flow regime). The aim of this research is to study numerically the effect of convective heat and mass transfer flow of a viscous fluid in the reactor. Assuming that the variations in angular direction around the central axis are negligible makes it possible to reduce the model to a 2D axisymmetric model.The numerical procedure to solve the governing equations with appropriate boundary conditions will be conducted by finite element formulation based on the Galerkin weighted residual approach.The investigation of forced convection flow, heat and mass transfer phenomena through a tubular reactor is carried. The implications of heat of reaction (H), rate of reaction (R) and solid volume fraction of water-copper nanofluid () on the flow structure, heat transfer and mass transfer characteristics are presented. The results are presented in the form of isothermal lines, iso-concentrations and stream function, average Nusselt number and Sherwood number. Present numerical results have also been compared with published result and found good agreement. The rates of forced convective heat transfer and mass transfer enhance 14 and 20%, respectively for rising volume fraction (ϕ) upto 3% with compared to base fluid.