Development of intensified flat-plate packed-bed solar reactors for heterogeneous photocatalysis
| Autor: | Antonio Carlos Silva Costa Teixeira, Leandro Issamu Nagamati, João Gabriel M. Carneiro, Bruno Ramos |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Packed bed
Materials science Health Toxicology and Mutagenesis FOTOCATÁLISE General Medicine 010501 environmental sciences 01 natural sciences Pollution Reaction rate Chemical engineering Specific surface area Mass transfer Photocatalysis Slurry Environmental Chemistry Degradation (geology) Porosity 0105 earth and related environmental sciences |
| Zdroj: | Repositório Institucional da USP (Biblioteca Digital da Produção Intelectual) Universidade de São Paulo (USP) instacron:USP |
| Popis: | Solar-driven photocatalysis is a promising water-cleaning and energy-producing technology that addresses some of the most urgent engineering problems of the twenty-first century: universal access to potable water, use of renewable energy, and mitigation of CO2 emissions. In this work, we aim at improving the efficiency of solar-driven photocatalysis by studying a novel reactor design based on microfluidic principles using 3D-printable geometries. The printed reactors had a dimensional accuracy of 97%, at a cost of less than $1 per piece. They were packed with 1.0-mm glass and steel beads coated with ZnO synthesised by a sol-gel routine, resulting in a bed with 46.6% void fraction (reaction volume of ca. 840 μL and equivalent flow diameter of 580 μm) and a specific surface area of 3200 m2 m−3. Photocatalytic experiments, under sunlight-level UV-A irradiation, showed that reactors packed with steel supports had apparent reaction rates ca. 75% higher than those packed with glass supports for the degradation of an aqueous solution of acetaminophen; however, they were strongly deactivated after the first use suggesting poor fixation. Glass supports showed no measurable deactivation after three consecutive uses. The apparent first-order reaction rate constants were between 1.9 and 9.5 × 10−4 s−1, ca. ten times faster than observed for conventional slurry reactors. The mass transfer was shown to be efficient (Sh > 7.7) despite the catalyst being immobilised onto fixed substrates. Finally, the proposed reactor design has the merit of a straightforward scaling out by sizing the irradiation window according to design specifications, as exemplified in the paper. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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