Effects of Fiber Arrangement on Flow Characteristics Along a Four-Fiber Element of Fiber Extractors

Fiber extractors, as process-intensified equipment, facilitate many applications, such as the purification of oils. The development of high-fidelity computational models is crucial to optimize the design. However, simulating microscale flows around tens of thousands of microfiber arrays is computationally unfeasible. Thus, it is necessary to identify smaller elements, consisting of only a few fibers, that can represent flow within massively arrayed fiber extractors. This study employed computational fluid dynamics to investigate different configurations of four-fiber elements to achieve this aim. Following previous modeling featuring flow around only one fiber, the goal was to understand how variations in inter-fiber distances affect the phase structures of a corn oil/water mixture, the steady-state interfacial surface area per unit of fluid volume, and the pressure drop along the flow direction. The study explored various total and relative flow rates and contact angles. The research characterized the flow as semi-restricted annular, noting the influence of neighboring fibers on phase complexity. The inter-fiber distance played a crucial role in generating high interfacial areas and reducing pressure. The chaotic nature of the slug interfaces facilitated intermixing between flows along different fibers. Interestingly, the specific interfacial area reached an optimum when the inter-fiber distance was between 10 and 50 μm.