Abstract
Against the background of current and future global challenges, such as climate change, process engineering requires increasingly specific solutions adapted to the respective problem or application, especially in gas–liquid contact apparatuses. One possibility to adjust the conditions in this kind of apparatuses is an intelligent and customized structuring, which leads to consistent fluid properties and flow characteristics within the reactor. In the course of this, the interfacial area for mass transfer, as well as residence times, have to be adjusted and optimized specifically for the respective application. In order to better understand and advance the research on intelligent customized additively manufactured lattice structures (AMLS), the phase distributions and local gas holdups that are essential for mass transfer are investigated for different structures and flow conditions. For the first time a tomographic measurement technique is used, the Electrical Capacitance Volume Tomography (ECVT), and validated with the volume expansion method and a fiber optical needle probe (A2PS-B-POP) for an air-water system for different modes of operation (with or without co-current liquid flow in empty or packed state). The ECVT proved to be particularly useful for both in the empty tube and the packed state and provided new insights into the phase distributions occurring within structured packings, which would have led to significantly underestimated results based on the visual reference measurements, especially for a densely packed additively manufactured lattice structure (5 mm cubic on the tip). Particularly for the modified structures, which were supposed to show local targeted differences, the ECVT was able to resolve the changes locally. The additional use of a pump for co-current flow operation resulted in slightly higher fluctuations within the ECVT data, although local events could still be resolved sufficiently. The final comparison of the empty tube at rest data with a fiber optical needle probe showed that the results were in good agreement and that the local deviations were due to general differences in the respective measurement techniques.
Highlights
IntroductionHeterogeneous flow conditions frequently occur in multiphase contact apparatuses, which can lead to inhomogeneous reaction conditions radially across the reactor cross-section and the reactor height
Information (SI), Table S1 summarizes all measured average means the volume expansion method presented discussed based on four cases total gasofholdup data as well as the meanare deviation for and all cases studied for comparison
The use of Electrical Capacitance Volume Tomography (ECVT) to determine the local phase distributions was compared with the volume expansion measurements for different modes of operation
Summary
Heterogeneous flow conditions frequently occur in multiphase contact apparatuses, which can lead to inhomogeneous reaction conditions radially across the reactor cross-section and the reactor height. Since the rapid rise of additive manufacturing in the last decade and the steady influx of new technical manufacturing possibilities of this innovative technology, it is gaining increasing acceptance in chemical process engineering [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. As a result of the newly gained degrees of freedom in the design and layout of reactors, new concepts for the development of customized reactor solutions are on the way [23,24,25,26,27]. One current research area is the development of Additively Manufactured Lattice Structures (AMLS)
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