A coupled experimental/numerical approach for fluids mixing study under supercritical antisolvent process conditions in microreactors

Fan Zhang (1) , Arnaud Erriguible (2, 1) , Samuel Marre (1)

1 ICMCB - Institut de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Bordeaux
2 I2M - Institut de Mécanique et d'Ingénierie de Bordeaux

Supercritical antisolvent techniques have demonstrated promises for processing organic materials at the nanoscale. However, their industrial development is still limited by the poor understanding of the inherent coupled physico-chemical mechanisms (thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and nucleation-growth). Previous work has demonstrated that it was possible to implement Supercrical AntiSolvent prcoesses in microfluidics devices (μSAS), but without deeper investigations into the physico-chemical phenomena [1]. Indeed, micromixing could have a significant effect over particles size and size distribution since homogeneous concentration distribution and high degree of supersaturation can only be reached by intense micromixing obtained through various strategies of mixing geometries. Therefore, we have investigated coflowing fluids at high pressure in a microchip to address the classical limitations and to well control the process conditions. By comparing the experimental observations to the numerical simulation, fluid flow behaviour has been studied for microfluidic mixing and the process condition effects have been captured.

Domaines: Matériaux

Fan Zhang, Arnaud Erriguible, Samuel Marre. A coupled experimental/numerical approach for fluids mixing study under supercritical antisolvent process conditions in microreactors. 17th European Meeting on Supercritical Fluids and 7th European Meeting High Pressure Technology, ITQUIMA, Apr 2019, Ciudad Real, Spain. pp.23-24. ⟨hal-02900032⟩