Enhanced numerical simulation of photocatalytic reactors with an improved solver for the radiative transfer equation

Abstract

This work presents the enhanced numerical simulation of the radiation transport in three different types of photocatalytic reactor using a novel Discrete Ordinate Method model recently developed for the open-source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) platform OpenFOAM. The photoreactors represent commonly used geo-metries and illumination sources in the field of heterogeneous photocatalysis: an annular reactor illuminated by a mercury fluorescent lamp, a tubular reactor coupled to a compound parabolic collector illuminated by sun-light, and a tubular reactor illuminated by LEDs. Simulations were carried out for different photocatalyst con-centrations, considering absorption and anisotropic scattering, showing differences smaller than 2.4% with re-spect to the results obtained by commercial CFD software for systems with isotropic emission, such as fluorescent lamps. Moreover, the model was able to improve the simulation of solar reactors and dramatically outperformed the simulation of LED sources, due to the combined effect of quadrature rotation and cone-limit fitting for cone-shaped sources, as well as a LED-specific power-cosine light distribution. The developed model has been thor-oughly validated and is now available to the open-source CFD community. It allows a comprehensive numerical simulation of radiation transport using any type of light source, with applications in numerous engineering fields where optical phenomena affect the performance of the process.