Tomographic and numerical distributor studies in bubble column reactors

Bubble column reactors are widely preferred in the petro/chemical industries due to flexible residence time, excellent heat and mass transfer characteristics and the absence of moving parts. Here, proper sparger design is essential to tune bubble size and bubble rise velocity and to provide optimal holdup and mixing behavior (Kulkarni and Joshi, 2011). Information pertaining to bubble size distribution, pressure distribution in various distributor is scantily available. Therefore, we provide a comparative study on different gas distributors in terms of gas hold-up and bubble size distribution using gamma-ray computed tomography and wire-mesh sensor techniques. Four different types of gas distributor were used, e.g. sieve plate, ring sparger, spider and radial sparger. In addition, the influence of the gas distributor on the above mentioned parameters is also predicted using Euler-Euler approached and validated with the experimental results.