Experimental and Numerical Studies of Flow in Rectangular Bubble Columns

Bubbly flow is encountered in a wide variety of industrial applications ranging from flows in nuclear reactors to process flows in chemical reactors. The presence of a second phase, re-circulating flow, instabilities of the gas plume and turbulence, complicate the hydrodynamics of bubble column reactors. This paper describes preliminary experimental and numerical results obtained in a rectangular bubble column with a cross-sectional area of 20 cm2. Images obtained from a high speed camera have been processed to calculate bubble velocities, bubble turbulence parameters and bubble size distributions. Gas disengagement technique was used to obtain the volume averaged gas fraction over a range of superficial gas velocities. Numerical calculations were performed with an Eulerian-Eulerian two–fluid model approach using the commercial code CFX-4.4. In this paper, the image processing algorithms and numerical modeling are discussed and an analysis of the preliminary results presented.