Hierarchical heat transfer modeling of a continuous millireactor

Continuous millireactors are important but complex devices. Knowledge of their heat transfer characteristics is essential for their design and operation, but can be difficult to determine with experiments alone. We present a hierarchical CFD model which simulates the fluid flow and heat transfer of a Miprowa Lab millireactor in three increasing levels of detail, and which is validated with experimental data. The model is then used to infer additional process information that is not available via physical measurements and which in turn is used to calculate heat transfer coefficients of the channel. The computational results show that using only the experimental values under-predicts the heat transfer coefficients with a mismatch of up to 11 %. Quantifying this deviation is a valuable benefit provided by the model. The model paves the way for predicting the heat transfer behavior of the reactor for different process conditions or even model-based optimization of the reactor geometry.