A conservative model for high-throughput synthesis of nanoparticles in reacting gas flows

Abstract

Considerable progress has been made over the past decades in the modeling of gas-phase synthesis of nanoparticles. However, when the nanoparticles mass fraction is large representing up to 50 % of the mixture mass fraction, some issues can be observed in the self-consistent modeling of the production process. In particular, enthalpy exchanges between gas and particle phases and differential diffusion between the two phases are usually neglected, since the particle mass fraction is generally very small. However, when high nanoparticle mass fractions are encountered, these simplifications may cause non conservation of the total enthalpy or the total mass. In the present paper, we propose a conservative model for nanoparticles production from gas-phase processes with a high throughput of nanoparticles. The model is derived in order to satisfy conservations of both enthalpy and mass and is validated on laminar one-dimensional premixed and non-premixed flames. In particular, it is shown that the enthalpy of the particle phase as well as the differential diffusion of the gas phase with respect to the particle phase cannot be generally neglected when the nanoparticles concentration is high to preserve the accuracy of the numerical results