Matthias Adams, Georgios D. Stefanidis and Tom Van Gerven of the Department of Chemical Engineering, KU Leuven, and Department of Process Analysis and Plant Design, NTUA, have published a new article entitled: ”Determining residence time distributions in oscillatory baffled reactors: A comparison between experiments and CFD-simulations.” The article was published in Chemical Engineering and Processing – Process Intensification on 13 May, 2025.
Oscillatory flow reactors are a process intensification technology that aims at enabling plug flow-like operation for inherently slow processes. However, the plug flow regime is usually challenging to obtain in practice. To that end, this work focuses on simulating residence time distributions in oscillatory baffled reactors with for the first time an experimental validation. Four different physical models are implemented to simulate residence time distributions: 2D-axisymmetric laminar, 2D-axisymmetric turbulent κ-ε, 3D laminar and 3D turbulent κ-ε. Different flow conditions are tested in a range between 50 and 250 for the net Reynolds number and 50 and 300 for the oscillatory Reynolds number. The comparison between experiments and simulations is done both qualitatively and quantitatively. The quantitative parameters include: the mean residence time, the root mean square error and the number of ideal tanks in series which result in the same residence time distribution as the measured one. The comparison reveals that using only one parameter is not sufficient to evaluate the alignment between experimental and simulated residence time distributions. The results show that in almost all tested flow conditions 3D laminar physics are necessary to have an accurate prediction of the experimental residence time distribution. However, for the applied flow parameters in this work, literature advises in general to use a 2D-axisymmetric laminar physics to model local flow patterns. This demonstrates the need for new guidelines to model residence time distributions in oscillatory baffled reactors and the importance of experimental validation.
Reference
Matthias Adams, Georgios D. Stefanidis, Tom Van Gerven, Determining residence time distributions in oscillatory baffled reactors: A comparison between experiments and CFD-simulations, Chemical Engineering and Processing – Process Intensification, Volume 213, 2025, 110297, ISSN 0255-2701, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cep.2025.110297.
Acknowledgements
Funding by the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation programmes is gratefully acknowledged for the SIMPLI-DEMO project (grant agreement No 101058279).
