| Abstract
| - To better understand the complicated phenomena in a precipitation process, computational fluiddynamics (CFD) is utilized to account for reactions, crystallization, mixing, and their interactions.The moment transformations of the population balances taking into account the chemical andcrystallization kinetics are integrated into a CFD solver to describe the generation andtransportation of the crystal phase. The current work applies this CFD tool to simulate thereactive precipitation process in a semibatch crystallizer, which is widely used in chemical andpharmaceutical industries. BaSO4 precipitation is employed as an example system. The influenceof hydrodynamics in the stirred tank, as characterized by the impeller speed and feed location,on the distribution of supersaturation and the subsequent crystal size distribution is investigated.The numerical predictions are validated with measurements and can be used as an aid in theoptimization of semibatch precipitator design.
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