Verification of Baffle Factor for Straight Pipe Flow

The baffle factor is a parameter widely used to describe flow system characteristics. This indicator is very important in designing disinfection devices. For example, it is used to convert the plug flow time to the actual fluid residence time in the flow system of interest. Its accurate determination is a complex problem requiring tracer experiments or computational fluid dynamics simulations. Therefore, in practice, it is often taken from tables provided in the literature. The literature sources, however, state that the baffle factor for a flow in a straight pipe is equal to unity, which implies the identity between the pipe flow model and the plug flow model. This assumption is doubtful. The aim of the present work is to verify the baffle factor values assumed for the pipe flow. The merit of this study is the analytical derivation of the expression describing the baffle factor value with respect to flow characteristics. To this purpose, the analytical solution of a one-dimensional advection-diffusion equation with a Heaviside initial condition was used. It was demonstrated that the aforementioned assumption is wrong, as the baffle factor for a straight pipe is significantly less than unity.