Integral Design Methodology of Photocatalytic Reactors for Air Pollution Remediation

PASSALÍA, CLAUDIO; ALFANO, ORLANDO; BRANDI, RODOLFO

MOLECULES

MOLECULAR DIVERSITY PRESERVATION INTERNATIONAL-MDPI

Año: 2017 vol. 22

1420-3049

An integralreactor design methodology was developed to address the optimal design of photocatalyticwall reactors to be used in air pollution control. For a target pollutant to beeliminated from an air stream, the proposed methodology is initiated with amechanistic derived reaction rate. The determination of intrinsic kineticparameters is associated with the use of a simple geometry laboratory scalereactor, operation under kinetic control and a uniform incident radiation flux,which allows computing the local superficial rate of photon absorption. Thus, asimple model can describe the mass balance and a solution may be obtained. Thekinetic parameters may be estimated by the combination of the mathematicalmodel and the experimental results. The validated intrinsic kinetics obtainedmay be directly used in the scaling-up of any reactor configuration and size.The bench scale reactor may require the use of complex computational softwareto obtain the fields of velocity, radiation absorption and speciesconcentration. The complete methodology was successfully applied to theelimination of airborne formaldehyde. The kinetic parameters were determined ina flat plate reactor, whilst a bench scale corrugated wall reactor was used toillustrate the scaling-up methodology. In addition, an optimal folding angle ofthe corrugated reactor was found using computational fluid dynamics tools.