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On importance of surface forces in a microfluidic fluidized bed

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-09-08, 12:30 authored by Vladimir Zivkovic, Mark Biggs
Fluidized beds potentially offer a means of significantly enhancing mixing, heat and mass transfer under the low Reynolds number flow conditions that prevail in microfluidic devices. However, as surface forces at the microscale can be significant relative to hydrodynamics forces, fluidization within a microfluidic channel can be potentially hindered or even prevented through particle adhesion to the channel walls. We have used the acid–base theory of van Oss, Chaudhury and Good to predict the propensity for adhesion of particles on microfluidic fluidized bed walls for various practically important wall material/particle/fluid combinations. Comparison of the results from this approach with experimental observations indicates that it provides a robust means of predicting the adhesion propensity. It is also demonstrated how results from the model can be used to estimate for a system of interest the particle size range in which the particle–wall surface forces transition from being dominant to being insignificant.

Funding

VZ acknowledges the University of Adelaide for his fellowship for research in microfluidics area.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Chemistry

Published in

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING SCIENCE

Volume

126

Pages

143 - 149 (7)

Citation

ZIVKOVIC, V. and BIGGS, M.J., 2015. On importance of surface forces in a microfluidic fluidized bed. Chemical Engineering Science, 126, pp. 143 - 149.

Publisher

© Elsevier Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Chemical Engineering Science [© Elsevier Ltd] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2014.12.023 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

ISSN

0009-2509

Language

  • en