The Enhancement of Liquid-Liquid Extraction Performance By Using Hollow Oil Droplets with Microbubbles As Dispersed Phase (Electronic Poster Presentation)

The Enhancement of Liquid-liquid Extraction Performance by Using Hollow Oil Droplets with microbubbles as Dispersed Phase

Wenting Wang, Guotao Liu, Jing Tan, Jianhong Xu*, Guangsheng Luo

State Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Micro-structured chemical systems have become one of most important methods for realizing greener, more efficient, safer and more controllable chemical engineering processes, and they continue to show promise for the further development of modern chemical industries. In this work, process intensification of liquid¨Cliquid extraction with high phase ratio by forming G/W/O (gas in water phase in organic phase) microdispersion system is carried out.

Extraction of solute from an organic phase to an aqueous phase was selected as the model system. The influence of the addition of gas phase as well as dispersion size on mass transfer performance is investigated. The results show that both the increase in the addition of gas phase and decrease in dispersion size lead to significant enhancement in mass transfer performance, especially for the overall mass transfer coefficient. As gas-to-water flow rate ratio increases from 25 to 600, the overall volumetric mass transfer coefficient increases by nearly two orders of magnitude. The calculation result shows good coincidence with experimental values. The modeling investigation possibly leads to a further understanding of the mechanism of process intensification of liquid¨Cliquid extraction process by introducing microbubbles and forming G/W/O microdispersion system and also helps the development of new extraction processes as well as design of microdispersion devices with compactness and high efficiency.

Key words: micro-dispersion; G/O/W double emulsion; liquid- liquid extraction; mass transfer