On the transient flow characteristics in Confined Impinging Jet Mixers - CFD simulation and experimental validation

Confined impinging jet reactors (CIJMs) are very efficient mixing devices. Due to the generation of high turbulent dissipation and, thus, intensive mixing of two colliding liquid flows CIJMs are widely used in laboratory applications. Besides low construction effort, these mixers enable a sensitive control of fast reactions, an efficient initial homogenization of educts and consequently a rapid build-up of super saturation as the driving force for precipitation and crystallization. The understanding of fluid mechanics and mixing in those CIJMs is of fundamental interest for a proper description of parallel or consecutive processes. Therefore, this paper gives an insight into characteristic procedures, with the main focus on the turbulent flow regime in a T- and Y-CIJM. Experimental investigation on the local mixing behavior of liquid-phase impinging jets in static mixers is carried out by using an optical laser induced fluorescence (LIF) and particle image velocimetry (PIV) setup in order to avoid optical measurement errors due to the cylindrical geometry, a refractive index correction of fluids with the ionic additive NH4SCN has been carried out Due to poor information in literature, important properties of the corrected aqueous solution are listed. Another main focus of this work lies in the mathematical modeling of the flow field based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. The transient hybrid Detached Eddy-SST-k-omega turbulence approach is introduced as a computational cost-efficient highly accurate method to calculate flow conditions in turbulent CIJMs. LIF and PIV as well as pressure drop measurements provide a wide set of data that serve to validate CFD simulations. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.