Study of the effect of the microfluidic effect on reducing the reaction times

This study investigated the possibility of generating cavitation effects in microfluidic reactors at sharp pressure drops (from 10 to 1 atm.) without the use of ultrasonic sources. The calculations revealed that with the parameters characteristic of microfluidic systems (channel diameter of 1 mm, flow rate of 100 ml/h), an energy dissipation rate of approximately 3.225 W/cm² was achieved. This value exceeds the known cavitation threshold for aqueous solutions and is within the interval characteristic of cavitation induced by high-frequency sources. A decrease in the diameter of the channel contributes to an increase in specific power, thereby increasing the probability of cavitation. The dependencies of the kinetics of the first-order reaction on the intensity of cavitation were determined. At α = 0.8 (cavitation amplification coefficient selected from the literature), the velocity constant increases from 0.010 to 0.0358 s–1, which leads to a significant reduction in the time required to achieve a given degree of transformation.