Vivek V. Buwa
Multi-scale Simulations

Gas-liquid distributors for Packed Bed

To ensure efficient performance of a Trickle bed reactor (TBR) in the industry, several crucial parameters, eg. effective catalyst utilization, optimum gas/liquid distribution and minimum radial temperature differences, need to be addressed. Amongst these parameters, an optimal design of a gas-liquid distributor is very important to achieve uniform liquid distribution inside a TBR. Our research group also works on the optimization of gas-liquid distributors in packed beds for cocurrent downward flow, to get uniform and maximum range of liquid coverage on the top of the packed bed. For this, in-house fabricated voidage probes are used to measure the time-averaged liquid holdup distribution, experimentally. The experimental data is utilized to develop a suitable Eulerian two-fluid model to simulate liquid distribution through industrial gas-liquid distributors.
                                   Distributor I                                     Distributor II  Distributor III Distributor IV
 
Liquid flow through proposed designs of gas-liquid distributors to achieve more uniform and wider liquid discharge pattern
 
Morphological study of liquid flow through different gas-liquid distributors (with corresponding voidage probe signals)
CFD predictions of liquid distribution, and velocity magnitudes of liquid and gas for flow through standard chimney (left) and standard bubble cap (right) using Eulerian-Eulerian simulations
 

Publications/conference presentations:

  • Ekta Jain, Vivek V. Buwa and Madhusudan Sau, Gas-liquid Flow through Chimney and Bubble-cap Distributors, presented at 13th International Conference on Gas–Liquid and Gas–Liquid–Solid Reactor Engineering (GLS13), 2017, Brussels, Belgium.