Estimation of Gas–Liquid Slug Lengths for Parallelized T-shaped Microreactors

Abstract

In the previous research, a method to estimate gas and liquid slug lengths in a single T-shaped microreactor was developed on the basis of the fluctuating feed pressure data. In this research, an experimental study was carried out to investigate the applicability of the method to 4-parallelized T-shaped microreactors connected to manifold-type flow distributors. As a result, it was confirmed that, in every reactor, the fluctuation cycle of feed pressure was equal to the generation cycle of a pair of gas and liquid slugs, the lengths of which could be estimated accurately. In addition, it was proposed that, by using Fourier transform analysis of pressure fluctuation time series obtained at the inlet of the liquid-side flow distributor, the number of pressure sensors required for estimating all the pressure fluctuation cycles is reduced to just one. The effectiveness of the proposed method was experimentally demonstrated under both normal and abnormal conditions of the process. Furthermore, by using the proposed method and two feed flow rate sensors, it was shown that when a partial blockage occurred in a microreactor, the estimation errors in the gas and liquid slug lengths were within 5% of real values.