CFD Application in Chemical and Environmental Engineering

**85**

**1. Introduction**

fluid dynamic simulation.

**Chapter 5**

**Abstract**

ANSYS Fluent®

Hydrodynamic Analysis on a

Photocatalytic Reactor Using

*Abel Hurtado-Macias, Sandra Iliana Torres-Herrera,* 

*Elva Marcela Coria-Quiñones, Raúl Armando Olvera-Corral* 

Solar technology includes a wide variety of developments in environmental applications that include photovoltaic cells and photocatalytic devices, among others. Sunlight usage as a clean energy source is highly desirable in technology applications. The main interest of this proposal is to carry on with hydrodynamic analysis in photocatalytic reactors applications where sunlight is used to activate a chemical reaction to degrade water pollutants and calculations are based in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) using ANSYS®. The different steps, geometric domain, preprocessing steps, setup, and postprocessing steps, are described to display an analysis of a numerical calculation during the design of a photocatalytic reactor using the commercial software ANSYS Fluent®. This work may help as a guide for chemical reactor design and includes a numerical solution of one case for a photocatalytic reactor during its design process. In addition, simplifications are explained which enable the designer to make an efficient process of the numerical calculation. Calculations and analysis are carried over in ANSYS Fluent® a powerful

*Carlos Omar Ríos-Orozco, Miriam López-Guzmán,* 

multi-physics program suite to develop photocatalytic reactors.

**Keywords:** hydrodynamics, CFD, ANSYS®, photocatalysis, chemical reactor

Chemical reactor design is a complex task that requires multiple disciplines working together to obtain an efficient design. Among the different tools that can be used during the chemical reactor design development, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is one that has attracted attention due to the interesting extent of simulation capabilities that latest code versions offer. In this chapter, the main focus relates to the first step that needs to be resolved during a CFD simulation, that is,

Supported by brief theoretical fundamentals as design guidelines and software tools such as computer-aided design (CAD) and ANSYS Fluent®, a case of study for

*Adolfo Ruiz-Soto, Diana Barraza-Jiménez,* 

*and Manuel Alberto Flores-Hidalgo*

**Chapter 5**
