Special Projects: Cylindrical Membrane Reactor

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This project comes under the heading of Challenging.
We received a request for an electrochemical reactor that could mount a cylindrical membrane. The researchers had a specific membrane in mind, and described its properties as being fairly flexible. They had prepared a model with the mounted membrane, but wanted the assembly to be jacketed, and they contacted us for help.

After a fair amount of head scratching, we proposed the configuration show here. The image on the right shows the assembled reactor using wire mesh as a stand-in for the membrane. The images below illustrate some of the design details.

Below and on the right shows the mount for the membrane cylinder; grooves tooled into stock glass tubing sized to fit an oring "clamp". These specially tooled parts are incorporated into the assembly that includes more standard components, such as Schott DN100 flanges and seal set, and GL glass threads and plastic components.Cylindrical Reactor Mounting Detail

Perforated Cylindrical Reactor

The bottom porting is shown below. The interior portion of the membrane remains isolated by attaching the membrane mount to 1" diameter tubing and passing this through a GL45 teflon faced sealing ring.

Reactor Bottom Porting Detail

An interesting and novel configuration. We now wait for reports as to how it performs.


Cylindrical Membrane Reactor

The porting calls for flows that could be directed and monitored on either side of the membrane. A crossection of the head pictured below illustrates this configuration, and also shows the membrane mounting groove.

Cross Section of Head

Reactor Head detail



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