An experimental and CFD study of liquid jet injection into a partially baffled mixing vessel: A contribution to process safety by improving the quenching of runaway reactions

Thermal runaway remains a problem in the process industries with poor or inadequate mixing contributing significantly to these incidents. An efficient way to quench such an uncontrolled chemical reaction is via the injection of a liquid jet containing a small quantity of a very active inhibiting agent (often called a stopper) that must be mixed into the bulk of the fluid to quench the reaction. The hazards associated with such runaway events mean that a validated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model would be an extremely useful tool. In this paper, the injection of a jet at the flat free surface of a partially baffled agitated vessel has been studied both experimentally and numerically. The dependence of the jet trajectory on the injection parameters has been simulated using a single-phase flow CFD model together with Lagrangian particle tracking. The comparison of the numerical predictions with experimental data for the jet trajectories shows very good agreement. The analysis of the transport of a passive scalar carried by the fluid jet and thus into the bulk, together with the use of a new global mixing criterion adapted for safety issues, revealed the optimum injection conditions to maximise the mixing benefits of the bulk flow pattern.