Loop Reactors - Revolutionizing Reaction Engineering

Loop Reactors have set a benchmark when it comes to reactions that have important consideration of uniformly controlled mixing and intense dispersion without mechanical agitation. Apart from being easily operable, these reactors have a very peculiar advantage of having a simple construction and requirement of very less power for operation. Hence loop reactors are gaining wider acceptance in the chemical industry. Numerous aspects of the loop reactors have been studied and documented in the past - gas hold up studies, mass transfer studies, flow distribution studies and residence time distribution studies, being the most researched ones.

After a systematic literature review, it was found that computational fluid dynamic approach is the new addition to research domain of the loop reactors. Modelling and simulation using various reaction models and turbulence models are a new trend among researchers and various papers have been published on the same. Recently, process control studies have also been explored briefly in context of loop reactors, however this field needs more attention. Thermal hydraulics study on loop reactors is a vast field with numerous aspects and extensive research is being performed on the same. Nuclear research and techniques are focused on thermal hydraulics to a large extent and study of the same in loop reactors has immense scope. Present work is a critical analysis of various design factors which elucidate multiple aspects of loop reactors.