CFD analysis of a trickle bed with air-cmc system

Abstract

Trickle Bed Reactors have wide scale application in chemical process industries mainly in petrochemical and refinery process because of their flexibility and simplicity of operation. Pressure drop and liquid holdup are the basic parameters for design, scale up and operation of trickle bed reactors. However multiphase flow in trickle bed reactor is known to be extremely complex and depends on various effects including the physico-chemical properties of gas, liquid and solid phases, ratio of column diameter to particle diameter and most importantly gas and liquid superficial velocities. Since most of the fluids encountered in industrial processes are non Newtonian, simulations have been carried out for air- Carboxy Methyl Cellulose system. In the present work an attempt has been made to study the hydrodynamics of a co-current gas-liquid-solid trickle bed reactor. CFD simulations have been done using Eulerian-Eulerian approach for a trickle bed system. The contours of volume fraction for the different phases are shown. Also the effect of liquid and gas velocity on the phase hold up and pressure drop are represented in graphical form and studied. The results obtained from simulations have been compared with the experimental data available in literature and there is a close agreement between the two.