Experimental investigation of single-phase flow in structured packing by LDV

To date, many models have been developed to calculate the flow field in the structured packing by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique, but little experimental work has been carried out to serve the validation of flow simulation. In this work, the velocity profiles of single-phase flow in structured packing are measured at the Reynolds numbers of 20.0, 55.7 and 520.1, using the laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV). The time-averaged and instantaneous velocities of three components are obtained simultaneously. The CFD simulation is also carried out to numerically predict the velocity distribution within the structured packing. Comparison shows that the flow pattern, velocity distribution and turbulent kinetic energy (for turbulent flow) on the horizontal plane predicted by CFD simulation are in good agreement with the LDV measured data. The values of the x-and z-velocity components are quantitatively well predicted over the plane in the center of the packing, but the predicted y-component is significantly smaller than the experimental data. It can be concluded that experimental measurement is important for further improvement of CFD model.