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Indexed by:期刊论文

Date of Publication:2016-09-01

Journal:JOURNAL OF MECHANICS IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY

Included Journals:SCIE、EI、Scopus

Volume:16

Issue:6

ISSN No.:0219-5194

Key Words:Stirred reactor; agarose gel; CFD simulation; solid suspension; scale-up

Abstract:Agarose gel activation reaction, which is of great importance in preparing the carrier of the column packing material for blood purification, would be significantly influenced by the configuration and parameter of reactor. In order to optimize the structure design of the reactor and operating parameters of the process, the characteristics of suspension system composed of agarose gel, NaOH, water, 3-allyl bromide, and activated alumina were simulated numerically utilizing an Eulerian multiphase flow model and multi-reference frame (MRF) approach. The effect of impeller configuration was studied with three typical impellers, including Rushton disk turbine (DT), pitched blade downflow turbine (PBTD45), and pitched blade upflow turbine (PBTU45). The results showed that the optimum solid suspension was obtained using PBTD45 impeller with a diameter of 100mm and critical suspension speed of 570 rpm in a 20 L stirred reactor. In addition, the critical suspension speeds using the three impellers were calculated and the errors were all within the engineering allowance. Finally, the feasibility of scaleup design for agarose gel activation reactor was preliminarily discussed. The results would be useful to the optimization and scale-up of relevant reactor design.