Hydrodynamic analysis of structured packing material geometries

In chemical engineering applications, packed columns as well as tray columns are frequently used in separation processes. The structured packings are new generation packing materials that are good alternatives to the other type of column internals. Structured packing is a very open honeycomb structure with inclined flow channels giving a relatively high surface area but with very low resistance to gas flow. There are many studies in the literature about the performance of structured packings and studies on design of new geometries are going on. The hydrodynamic behavior of air in a dry channel of a structured packing was studied in this thesis. This was done on a software called COMSOL Multiphysics and in a 3D environment a physical model is defined based on linear flow condition in CFD module for simulations. According to the chosen parameters as two different crimp angle values, three different values of inlet velocity values and three pressure values,18 trials were made on COMSOL and in order to observe the effect of temperature change simulations were made under two temperatures. The results obtained from the trials were compared with the graphs in catalogues and they were in good convenience. This means such a study can be done instead of trying some new design of structured packings before laboratory work and this can be much more cost effective before constructing the real plant equipment.