Numbering-up of mini- and microchannel contactors and reactors

Multiphase downstream units and chemical conversion units with internal structures containing a variety of parallel flow channels are a promising technology to intensify, to rapidly develop, and to operate more safely absorption, extraction, or reaction processes. The performance of these units depends strongly on the distribution of the phases at the entrance. Technologies should provide a uniform phase distribution which is directly linked with a narrow residence time distribution of the fluids and the complete utilization of the solid surface for heat transfer, mass transfer and conversion. Furthermore, the scale-up should be straight forward from small structures to large structures. This work presents a novel distributor design for feeding two immiscible fluids such as a gas phase and a liquid phase into structures that contain several flow channels ( 1). It can be used either to feed separate channel arrays in the form of monolithic blocks, or can be integrated into existing channel structures of micro process equipment. The investigation of air-water flows in a 10-channel array verified that this simple distributor concept creates highly uniform Taylor flows in terms of bubble velocities, as well as gas bubble and liquid slug lengths irrespective the flow orientation.