Numerical Simulation Of The Mixing Process In A Soft Elastic Reactor With Bionic Peristaltic Contraction

Bionics always inspires people to solve practical problems.With a sufficient understanding of the digestive process inside the gastrointestinal tract,researchers found that movements towards the gastrointestinal wall facilitate mixing of high-viscosity digest efficiently.For conventional reactors,which walls are normally made from rigid materials,and the mixing of different components can only rely on auxiliary agitation equipment or static mixer,which requires more energy.Therefore,a soft elastic reactor was designed and developed,which inspired by the human upper digestive tract.The reactor is made of silicone,thus the wall of this reactor have good elasticity and also can be repeatedly deformed.The mixing in the reactor is driven by the deformation of the wall.It has been confirmed that the soft elastic reactor can complete the mixing of high-viscosity fluid.The soft reactor may avoid some shortcomings of traditional reactors,which could be worth in industrial applications in the near future.In this paper,a soft peristaltic contraction reactor that based on the wall motion of human small intestine is designed.A two-dimensional reactor model was established by Fluent,and various movement of the reactor wall was successfully implemented by a user-defined-function written in C language.Diverse operating conditions that could influence mixing performance were investigated.and the phenomenon of segmentation motion was illustrated with details.The study has found that the flow inside the reactor was divided into several parts by segmentation movement,specially,the number of these independent regions is exactly twice of that for segmentations,in addition,the region is relatively stable.After the peristaltic motion is added,the area isolation is broken and the overall mixing speed increases as the peristaltic become faster.The greater extent and higher frequency of contraction of the reactor wall,the stronger of convection within the reactor,will promote mixing.In this paper,the mechanism of fluid mixing in a soft peristaltic contraction reactor is studied roundly by means of computational fluid dynamics.