Incorporation of the GRG-optimization method in the design and simulation of solar falling-film slurry photocatalytic reactors operated under turbulent regime

Abstract

Contiene ilustracionesPhotocatalytic reactor modeling has always been a complex duty involving several phenomena that must be described with powerful and accurate mathematical tools. Most efforts have been focused on simulating systems under controlled conditions and simplifying some models to obtain practical but reliable solutions. In this study, a falling-film solar pilotscale photoreactor operated in turbulent regime is modeled for phenol degradation using the Generalized Reduced Gradient (GRG) method embedded in the MS Excel® environment. A Visual Basic code was developed to integrate this function with the equations corresponding to the transport phenomena, photons' emission and absorption models, mass balance, and kinetic expressions. The simulations were carried out considering different catalyst loads and radiation intensities, obtaining results with satisfactory agreement with experimental data of a TiO2-based slurry falling-film photoreactor operating with solar radiation and under a turbulent regime (R2=0.84 – 0.99). The model fitting improved with the empirical adjustment of the LVRPA exponent, exhibiting the strong dependence of this parameter on the radiation intensity. These results demonstrated that reliable simulationscan be carried out by adapting different tools of low-cost software like MS Excel® for potential full-scale applications of a falling-film solar photoreactor.Highlights Abstract Graphical Abstract Keywords Nomenclature 1. Introduction 2. Mathematical model of the falling-film reactor 3. Materials and methods 4. Results and discussion 5. Conclusions CRediT authorship contribution statement Declaration of Competing Interest Acknowledgments Appendix A. Supplementary material Data availability ReferencesControl de la contaminación de los recursos (agua, aire y suelo)Sostenibilidad ambiental aplicadaEl artículo presenta el modelado matemático de reactores fotocatalíticos de película descendente operando en régimen turbulento. La determinación de los parámetros cinéticos se realizó con el método del Gradiente Reducido Generalizado, a través de la programación en Visual Basic vinculado a MS Excel.Software requerido: Visual Basic de MS Exce