In order to determine the flow pattern in the TC reactor, the Reynolds
number based on the gap size has been adopted, as defined by
\(Re=\frac{\omega_{i}r_{i}d}{\nu}\) (17)
where ωi and ri are the
angular velocity and the radius of the inner cylinder, respectively.d is the gap size, and ν is the kinematic viscosity of the
suspension. In this study, various cases with different
Reynolds number have been
investigated by changing the rotational speed of the inner cylinder. The
critical Reynolds number (Rec ), which indicates
the presence of Taylor vortex flow was found to be about 97 with the
classical inner circular cylinder (i.e., radius
ratio\(\ \eta=\frac{r_{i}}{r_{o}}=0.8\)). When the Reynolds number
exceeds the critical Reynolds number, the flow pattern will
experience a series of
instabilities, including wavy Taylor vortex flow and turbulent Taylor
vortex flow, which can finally develop into turbulent Taylor flow
(Grossmann et al. , 2016).