Computational Fluid Dynamics Assessment of Flow Characteristic of Thin Liquid Film over Smooth and Corrugated Rotating Disk Surface

Abstract

Process Intensification (PI) is used for analysis and design of innovative equipment and processing methods with substantially improved sustainability, efficiency and environmental performance. PI can be categorised into two, which are process-intensifying equipment and process-intensifying method. Rotating disk reactor is one of the equipment that involves PI that leads to rapid mixing and short residence time. To have a better understanding of the hydrodynamics behaviour of the thin film formed over the rotating disk surface; in this paper, thin liquid film flow over the smooth and corrugated rotating disk surface has been performed using 2- dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. Grid independence analysis of computational domain has been performed. The volume of fluid (VOF) model is used to simulate the flow characteristic of the thin liquid film. The comparison of thin liquid film flow over smooth and corrugated rotating disk surface has been carried out for liquid inlet velocity, rotational speed and liquid inlet location towards the thin liquid film thickness. The increment of disk rotational speed and liquid inlet velocity results in higher thinning effect of film thickness over the rotating disk surface. The simulation result showed that the flow of thin liquid film over the smooth rotating surface exhibits more consistent thickness and settle down earlier compared to the flow over the corrugated surface. The right and left liquid inlet locations have similar convergence at the same velocities. It can be concluded that the liquid inlet locations do not have a significant role in the formation of the thin film flow, although it is hypothesised that the liquid inlet located in the middle would be an optimum configuration as designed in the previous experimental and numerical studies.