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Mass transfer is the net movement of mass from one location (usually meaning stream, phase, fraction, or component) to another. Mass transfer occurs in many processes, such as absorption , evaporation , drying , precipitation , membrane filtration , and distillation .
Some of the most common examples of transport analysis in engineering are seen in the fields of process, chemical, biological, [1] and mechanical engineering, but the subject is a fundamental component of the curriculum in all disciplines involved in any way with fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and mass transfer.
Distillation, also classical distillation, is the process of separating the component substances of a liquid mixture of two or more chemically discrete substances; the separation process is realized by way of the selective boiling of the mixture and the condensation of the vapors in a still.
Furthermore, there are some unit operations which combine even these categories, such as reactive distillation and stirred tank reactors. A "pure" unit operation is a physical transport process, while a mixed chemical/physical process requires modeling both the physical transport, such as diffusion, and the chemical reaction.
Stripping works on the basis of mass transfer. The idea is to make the conditions favorable for the component, A, in the liquid phase to transfer to the vapor phase. This involves a gas–liquid interface that A must cross. The total amount of A that has moved across this boundary can be defined as the flux of A, N A.
In applications to gas dynamics, the diffusion flux and the bulk flow should be joined in one system of transport equations. The bulk flow describes the mass transfer. Its velocity V is the mass average velocity. It is defined through the momentum density and the mass concentrations:
In the context of species or mass transfer, the Péclet number is the product of the Reynolds number and the Schmidt number (Re × Sc). In the context of the thermal fluids, the thermal Péclet number is equivalent to the product of the Reynolds number and the Prandtl number (Re × Pr). The Péclet number is defined as:
Mass transfer coefficients can be estimated from many different theoretical equations, correlations, and analogies that are functions of material properties, intensive properties and flow regime (laminar or turbulent flow). Selection of the most applicable model is dependent on the materials and the system, or environment, being studied.