Numerical modeling of polystyrene synthesis in coiled flow inverter

Recent studies show that microfluidic devices are gaining importance as micromixer in chemical and bio-chemical analysis systems. However, little attention has been paid to investigate chemical reactions such as polymerization reaction process in microreactors. In the present study, numerical modeling of the free-radical polymerization of styrene was carried out in novel coiled flow inverter (CFI) microreactor. The concept of CFI is based on the technique developed by Saxena and Nigam (AlChE J 30:363–368, 1984). This device is made up of helical coiled tube which is bent periodically to 90° at equidistant length. The CFD modeling for polymerization reaction taking place in coiled tube reactor was also performed in order to understand the influence of secondary flows on reactor performance for fluid flowing with very low flow rate. Its performance was compared with CFD results obtained in a straight tube reactor having identical length and operating under the same process conditions. The results showed that monomer conversion in the coiled tube reactor was higher than that of the straight tube reactor. Further work was carried out in the novel CFI reactor to study the effect of diffusion coefficient and number of bends on different parameters such as monomer conversion, number-average degree of polymerization (DP _n ), and polydispersity indexes (PDI). It was found that the performance of CFI as reactor increased when the diffusion coefficients of reactants was decreased. Thus, CFI was found to be an efficient microfluidic device for controlling the free-radical polymerization.