A commercial valve-assisted micromixer, manufactured by Ehrfeld (Germany), was tested for its use to precipitate L-asparagine from an aqueous solution using isopropanol as antisolvent. In a first part the mixing quality provided by the micromixer was studied by means of a competitive/parallel set of reactions following the approach of Baldyga, Bourne and Walker, Canadian J. Chem. Eng. 76 (1998) 641-649. Different experiments have been implemented and interpreted considering the average of Reynolds number of the inlet streams. Results show a good mixing quality that is comparable, in terms of absolute values of conversion, with other works present in literature. The precipitation experiments that followed revealed the limitation of the micromixer. The system was instable and particles adhesion occurred inside the mixing chamber. Improvements have been realized by changing the spring tension of the valve and introducing a commercial surfactant TRITON X-100.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-146310 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Ferrante, Francesco |
| Publisher | KTH, Skolan för kemivetenskap (CHE) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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