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Experimental investigation of cocurrent water/air down flow in SiSiC solid foam packed reactors

Claußnitzer, T.

Trickle bed reactors (TBR) are widely used in the chemical industry, especially for oxidation, hydrogenation and hydrodesulfurization processes. Since overall performance of TBR is essentially affected by the hydrodynamic properties of the package, lot of work has been done to improve characteristics of the reactor interior. Decreasing the particle size of conventional packings like spheres and cylinders increases the specific surface area but also the pressure drop.
Compared to commonly used packings, solid foams are promised to provide less pressure drop but higher surface area at once. To investigate to hydrodynamics in these packings, solid foams of three different pore densities (20 ppi, 30 ppi, 45 ppi) have been studied in an air/water cocurrently downflow system using ultrafast X-ray tomography to determine their hydrodynamic properties as well as their suitability as reactor packing.
Experiments were carried out at a broad range of gas and liquid superficial velocities of 0.2 ms-1 to 1.0 ms-1 and 0.01 ms-1 to 0.04 ms-1, respectively, covering different flow regimes, namely trickle flow, pulsing flow as well as the transition region.
With spatially-resolved measurements the liquid distribution behavior of solid foams has been investigated. It was shown, that the initial liquid distribution primarily depends on liquid distributor and the pore density of the applied foam, but is not as good as expected.
Following, temporally-resolved measurements at fixed measurement height were carried out. There, for each measurement setup the liquid saturation has been determined and a correlation has been proposed to describe the liquid saturation as a function of pore size as well as gas and liquid flow rate.
In the pulsing regime, investigations were accomplished regarding pulse properties like frequency and velocity. A strong influence of the pore density of the applied foams was found.

Keywords: trickle bed reactor; SiSiC solid foams; ultrafast X-ray tomography; hydrodynamics; co-current downflow

  • Diploma thesis
    TU Dresden, 2015
    Mentor: Zalucky, J., Hampel, U.
    160 Seiten

Permalink: https://www.hzdr.de/publications/Publ-22784
Publ.-Id: 22784