Numerical studies of the residence time distributions of an inwardly off-center shearing jet stirred reactor (IOS-JSR)

A newly developed inwardly off-center shearing jet stirred reactor (IOS-JSR) is proposed for enhanced turbulent mixing and better-defined mean flow residence times. As compared with two traditional JSRs, the present IOS-JSR is shown to have significant improvement in terms of resulting mixture uniformity and residence time distribution. The main drawback in traditional JSR design is the formation of strong vortices, which result in large residence time of the recirculating particles. As such, the distributions of residence time in traditional JSRs are much widened and fat-tailed. On the other hand, the jet configurations in the proposed IOS-JSR generate small vortices with different orientations, such that the net vorticity is close to zero. As a result, the IOS-JSR has a much narrower residence time distribution and can thus potentially improve current JSR design.