Computational design and analysis of MOVPE reactors

This paper presents a fundamental numerical analysis of flow and heat transfer in a vertical rotating disk reactor. These reactors are commonly used for growing thin films via chemical vapor deposition. Under certain conditions, rotating disk reactors have been found to exhibit multiple steady states, where desirable and undesirable flow patterns co-exist at the same conditions. The focus of this research is to predict the onset of multiplicity with respect to key system parameters, and thereby give guidance on reactor design and operation. Using bifurcation analysis algorithms we directly track what we believe is a global stability limit (the onset of multiple solutions). Results for a model system with constant physical and transport properties along with the Boussinesq approximation are compared to a model with actual fluid properties for nitrogen gas coupled with the ideal gas law.