Chemical Engineering Journal | 2021
Analyzing industrial CVD reactors using a porous media approach
Abstract
Abstract The uniformity of deposited film is a critical quality indicator for the product by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Quality control of deposited film remains a challenging task, especially for a CVD reactor used in the glass coating process, which often needs to simultaneously process multiple substrate surfaces. So far, an effective method for simulating the multi-substrate CVD reactor used in the glass coating process is unavailable excluding costly direct numerical simulation in real geometry. The numerical simulation and optimization of such a CVD reactor are also lacking. In this paper, a new CFD model was developed to investigate a special industrial-scale multi-substrate CVD reactor for the production of coated glass products. The unique porous media based modeling approach allowed us to efficiently address hundreds or even thousands of spatially-distributed surfaces in one batch of production. Simulation results demonstrate that the mixing performance of the gas reactant in the reactor can be improved by implementing the top-injection scheme, introducing natural convection, and redistributing the substrate surfaces, which can indirectly improve the uniformity of deposited film on the glass. The introduced method is generic and should be an effective tool to understand quality problems in large-scale multi-substrate CVD reactors and hence improve their design and operation.