Volume of fluid method for interfacial reactive mass transfer: Application to stable liquid film

A volume of fluid method is developed in order to simulate reactive mass transfer in two-phase flows and is applied to study reactive laminar liquid film. The thermodynamic equilibrium of chemical species at the interface is considered using Henry's law. The chemical species concentration equation is solved using primitive variables and local fluxes are locally directly calculated at the interface. The present treatment of jump discontinuity of chemical concentration is consistent with a volume of fluid approach and the difficulty to calculate accurate local mass flux across interface is overcome. For plane interface, the precision of the numerical simulation is found to be very satisfactory while for curved interface a special procedure has been developed to reduce the development of spurious fluxes at the interface. The algorithm is validated for different cases by comparison with available solutions. The method is then applied to study non-reactive and reactive mass transfer in a falling liquid film. The results show that the liquid side mass transfer is well predicted by the Higbie (1935) theory when the transfer is controlled by the film advection provided that adequate parameters are considered, i.e. the actual velocity at interface and not the average liquid film velocity. For situations controlled by diffusion, the Sherwood number tends to a constant value characteristic of purely diffusive situations. For the reactive mass transfer, first and second order irreversible chemical reactions in the liquid phase are considered. The numerical results are compared respectively, with Danckwerts (1970) and Brian et al. (1961) solutions and good agreement is observed. The proposed Volume of Fluid method is shown to be well adapted to deal with interfacial reactive mass transfer problems. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.