Slug flow capillary microreactor hydrodynamic study

Micro-fluidic applications have served as interface between the macroand nano-world. Micro-scale systems offer many advantages such as minimal reagent consumption, complex chemical waveforms, and significantly reduced analysis and experimentation time (for example, an important concept recently introduced was μTAS, the Micro Total Analysis System for details see [14]). The absence of inertial and turbulent effects in microfluidic devices offers new horizons for physical, chemical and biological applications. The small dimensions give high surface-to-volume ratios, small diffusion distances and easy temperature profiling where needed, giving the opportunity to manipulate substances in ways never imagined before. Drops or slugs and their application in microand nano-scales are very important in various fields of present science. For instance, cellbased assays [15], models for capillary blood vessels for red cells infected with malaria [17], drug delivery targeted at specific sites in the body for a less invasive chemotherapy, miniature biosamples preparations on fully automated biochips, for DNA sampling are all known applications in medical and genomic sectors. In chemical sciences, it has been used in two-phase chemical reactions [11], [8], [7], [3], [4], and elucidation and optimization of nitration reaction demonstrated by Dumman, who concluded that the capillary micro-reactor can be used for quantitatively examining exothermic liquid-liquid reaction systems [5], fast or dangerous reactions, solvent extraction, substances separation and so on. At the micro-scales, the problems associated with the scaling-up for large scale production by simply numbering-up are reduced. This means that several micro-reactors can be used to obtain the necessary products, instead of building complicated and expensive plants. Mathematical models describing the movement of drops, or in general, multiphase flows developed so far, are not able to predict or quantify properly all the important particularities of this complex systems (capillary micro-reactors). Hence a deeper knowledge of the physical problem, say hydrodynamics transport, is essential. This task requires powerful modeling techniques. Consequently, we initiated the hydrodynamic study of drops/slug movement through capillaries. We focused on the application of a slug flow micro-reactor model to match the necessities and behavior described in [13] and [12].