A Calibrated Computational Fluid Dynamics Model for Simulating the Rotating Disk Apparatus

Reaction kinetics between calcite and acid systems have been studied using the rotating disk apparatus (RDA). However, simplifying assumptions have been made to develop the current equations used to interpret RDA experiments to enable solving them analytically in contrast to using numerical methods. Previous work has revealed inadequacies of some of these assumptions, which necessitates the use of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to investigate their impact on the RDA results. The objectives of the current work are to develop a calibrated CFD and proxy model to simulate the reaction in the RDA and use this model to estimate the diffusion coefficient and the reaction rate coefficient of the reaction in the RDA. The present work developed the first calibrated CFD model to determine the diffusion coefficient and the reaction rate coefficient in the RDA with minimum assumptions in the hydrochloric acid (HCl) carbonate reaction. More specifically, the model relaxes the constant fluid properties, infinite acting reactor boundaries, and constant reaction surface area assumptions. The proxy model obtained results in reduced computational time with minimal compromise on accuracy. Finally, the proposed model showed an improvement of 63% in predicting the reaction kinetics between calcite and HCl compared to traditional methods.