Heat effects in photocatalytic reactor applications are discussed and a case study is analyzed where sunlight is used to activate a chemical reaction to degrade water pollutants. Heat is produced in the light-capturing process, and heat effects need to be better understood during the device design process. Radiative transfer equation (RTE) is the guiding equation used to calculate radiation proliferation in participating media, and it is used to describe the balance of radiative energy transport in the participating media including the interactions caused by different processes such as absorption, scattering, and emission, which also are subject to additional phenomena like weakening and magnification. This equation plays an important role in the design process since it may be included in the simulation process to represent the sunlight heat effects in the different photocatalytic reactor components. In this chapter, it is explained how to build a simplified algorithm to incorporate the RTE in a numerical calculation during the design of a photocatalytic reactor using the commercial software ANSYS®. In addition, simplifications are explained that enable the program to coordinate some coefficients such as absorption and dispersion so their effects are included within the numerical calculation. A user-defined function is presented in the end of the chapter as a usable algorithm in ANSYS® program with acceptable results for photocatalytic reactors.

Solar technology includes a wide variety of developments in environmental applications that include photovoltaic cells and photocatalytic devices, among others. Sunlight usage as a clean energy source is highly desirable in technology applications. The main interest of this proposal is to carry on with hydrodynamic analysis in photocatalytic reactors applications where sunlight is used to activate a chemical reaction to degrade water pollutants and calculations are based in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) using ANSYS ® . The different steps, geometric domain, preprocessing steps, setup, and postprocessing steps, are described to display an analysis of a numerical calculation during the design of a photocatalytic reactor using the commercial software ANSYS Fluent ® . This work may help as a guide for chemical reactor design and includes a numerical solution of one case for a photocatalytic reactor during its design process. In addition, simplifications are explained which enable the designer to make an efficient process of the numerical calculation. Calculations and analysis are carried over in ANSYS Fluent ® a powerful multi-physics program suite to develop photocatalytic reactors.