Spray and Reaction Characteristic of the Nozzles in Ethoxylation Reactors

External Loop Spray Reactors(ELSR) is one of the most advanced ethoxylation reactors in the world.The ethoxylation reaction nozzles are the core equipments,which have great effect on the production efficiency and product quality.A test platform was established,which was divided into four parts of spray system,laser measurement system,photographic system and flow distribution test system.Discharge coefficient,flow distribution,Sauter mean droplets size,particle size distribution and reaction performance have been studied experimentally.The correlations of the characteristics mentioned above versus pressure drop were gained respectively.And the experimental Probability Density Function (PDF) of the droplets size was gained and compared with five empirical distributions.The Log-hyperbolic distribution has a most agreement with the measured PDF.The circumferential nonuniformity has been discussed.The radial flow distributions of all measured nozzles can be classified as a unimodal,bimodal and trimodal distribution.At the same time,reaction performance of the special nozzles was measured in the industrial ELSR ethoxylation reactor.It is indicated that Sauter mean diameter affects the number of EO and reaction speed.The width of droplets size distribution affects the width of the molecular weight distributions.