Computational fluid dynamic simulation of fluid flow in a rotating packed bed

Abstract

Rotating packed bed (RPB) has been widely used in absorption, desorption, distillation, oxidation, crystallization, precipitation, polymerization, and production of nanoparticles. RPB utilizes centrifugal acceleration to intensify the mixing and mass-transfer processes. Under high-gravity, molecule diffusions are much faster than under normal gravity. With the centrifugal force generated by rotation, RPBs have considerable high mass-transfer and micromixing performance. However, because of the complexity of fluid flow inside the RPB, the flow experiments do not easily lead to the deeper understanding on the fluid dynamics in an RPB. In this paper, computational fluid dynamics model and two-, three-dimensional physical models have been developed to describe the RPB. Numerical simulation of the fluid flow and pressure drop in dry bed in an RPB using commercial software, Fluent, as a computational platform has been carried out. Different fluid flow rates, rotator speeds and gas flow rates have been systematically investigated. The preliminary simulation results show that the models used to describe the RPB can give rise to better understanding of the flow in an RPB.