Hydrodynamics of New Structured Packings: an Experimental and Micro-scale CFD Study

Corrugations on the packing surface affect the efficiency of mass transfer in packing column. The influences of corrugations on film flow characteristics were investigated by numerical and experimental methods in this paper aiming to investigate the influence of geometric configuration on the mass transfer efficiency. In the simulations, a multiphase solver in the open-source software OpenFOAM was used to track the free surface position with VOF method. To validate the simulations quantitatively, the velocity profiles in the liquid film fields in 2-D simulations are compared with the experimental results. The flow fields of three different types of packing structures, namely sinusoidal, triangular and rectangular corrugated plates, in the experiments correspond well with the simulation results. For the shape optimization design, the new structures of plates were proposed and the hydrodynamics of the new corrugations plates were analysed. The order of mass transfer results of different types of corrugated plates is arranged.