Design and Characterization of Micropost-Filled Reactor to Minimize Pressure Drop While Maximizing Surface-Area-to-Volume-Ratio
Micropost-filled reactors are commonly found in many micro total analysis system applications because of their high surface area for the surrounding volume. Design rules for micropost-filled reactors are presented here to optimize the performance of the micro-preconcentrator, which is a component of a micro gas chromatography system. The dimensionless figure of merit is proposed to be used to minimize the pressure drop while maximizing the surface-area-to-volume-ratio for a given overall channel geometry of the micropost-filled preconcentrator. Two independent models from the literature are used to predict the pressure drop across the micropost-filled channels for low Reynolds number flows. The pressure drop can be expressed solely as a function of a design parameter, β = a/s, a ratio of a radius of each post and a half-spacing between two adjacent posts. Pressure drop measurements are performed to experimentally corroborate the pressure drop model and the optimization using the dimensionless figure of merit. As the number of microposts; for a given β increases in a given channel size, a greater surface-area-to-volume-ratio will occur for a fixed pressure drop. Therefore, increasing the arrays of posts with smaller diameters and spacing will optimize the microreactor for higher surface area for a given flow resistance, at least until Knudsen flow begins to dominate.