A new sliding micro valve generating/separating slug flow in micro chemical process

Recently, the study of the micro chemical process that uses slug flow has been activated. Slug flow which is a flow of two liquids to appear as striped patterns in a channel increases reaction speed and mixing efficiency in the fields of chemical technology. Conventionally, passive slug flow generation / separation technique has been used for those purposes. But due to the specific gravity of the liquid, the flow quantity and the viscosity of the fluid, passive slug flow process results in low control accuracy of the slug length. The purpose of this study is generation / separation of the slug flow which doesn´t depend on the specific gravity, flow quantity and the viscosity of the fluids using dynamic slug flow generation technique with the electromagnetic valves. The generation experiment of slug flow is performed with the electromagnetic driving valve. As a result of the experiment, the slug pitch of water and oil can be miniaturized to 0.56 mm and 0.29mm, respectively. We have proposed also the separation system that separates slug flows. It works well even for non-uniform flow by monitoring the flow with an optical sensor. As a result of slug flow separation experiments, water and oil are separated with the separation ratios of 93.3% and 94.1%, respectively.