Design of microdistillation device

Abstract

During the last decades, scientists had been widely attracted for microchemical processing technology, due to its efficient mass and energy transfer as well as the increased safety they provide. Microstructured devices offer the possibility of intensifying distillation operations by providing high ratios of contact areas to volume, high driving force gradients and considerably short transport distances. However, the development of such separation micro devices has proven to be a very challenging task Indeed, the high surface-to-volume ratio prevailing at microscale results in an unstable boiling and thus in a drop of the distillation efficiency. It is therefore essential to ensure good thermal control in a lab-on-a-chip device in order to precisely achieve a certain desired temperature profile. So far, the existing micro-distillation concepts presented in literature are based on conventional heating and cooling methods, involving external heat transfer systems. The latter are characterized by high energy consumption and the difficulty to establish the required local temperature profile along the microdevice, leading therefore to the reduction of the driving force for mass transfer in the microdistillation process. In order to overcome these issues, we aim to point towards a novel heating system intended to operate alongside a microdistillation system. Therefore, several novel microheating sources are presented and compared, allowing to shape up a study of the different characteristics and a proposal of the integration of an innovative heating source in a microdistillation system is done. Integration of localized temperature controlled heat transfer systems within the microdistillation device constitutes a promising route to providing rapid and efficient heating / cooling along with a reliable control of local temperatures, with important potential to improve distillation efficiency while reducing the energy requirement of the whole system as compared to existing microdistillation systems.

Outgoing