ISSN print edition: 0366-6352 ISSN electronic edition: 1336-9075 Registr. No.: MK SR 9/7 Published monthly

Microreactor modeling for green photocatalytic degradation of water contaminants

Habeebllah Oladipo, Jimoh Adewole, Luqman Abidoye, Sara Al Hinai, Samar Al Kharusi, and Muayad Al Salti

Process Design and Computational Engineering Laboratory, Process Engineering Department, National University of Science and Technology (IMCO), Sohar, Oman

E-mail: oladipohabeebllah@yahoo.com

Received: 30 October 2023  Accepted: 31 May 2024

Abstract:

Water contaminants, from industrial and domestic sources, are of increasing concerns, globally. Degradation techniques that are green and cheap would spur industrial interest in large-scale environment-friendly large-scale treatment of these contaminants. To demonstrate this possibility, this study developed a new microreactor model for photocatalytic degradation of contaminants. The microreactor was modeled as a unit operation block in Aspen Plus software. The microreactor is considered as a non-ideal reactor and a tanks-in-series model. The model was solved using Microsoft Excel Visual Basic Application (VBA) interfaced with Aspen Plus software. Rhodamine B (RhB) and Caffeine were used as model pollutants, and the results obtained from the simulation study were compared with experimental data taken from the literature. There was a good agreement between simulation and experimental results. For the first time in the literature, we have used Aspen Plus software to investigate the effects of light intensity on pollutant degradation in a photocatalytic microreactor. The study shows that light intensity can compensate for the detrimental effects of both high pollutant inlet concentration and short microchannel length in the photocatalytic microreactor. However, the intrinsic property of a photocatalyst such as the bandgap does not allow light intensity to have a significant effect at very high as well as very low light wavelength. The model developed in this study is envisaged to bring photocatalytic microreactor processes closer to commercial scale due to their ease of integration into existing process flow diagrams within Aspen Plus software.

Keywords: Photocatalysis; Rhodamine B; Effect of light intensity; Aspen plus; User-defined model

Full paper is available at www.springerlink.com.

DOI: 10.1007/s11696-024-03543-x

Chemical Papers 78 (11) 6395–6403 (2024)