Gas–liquid interfacial mass transfer in trickle-bed reactors: state-of-the-art correlations

Abstract

The state-of-the-art of the gas-liquid mass transfer characteristics in trickle-bed reactors was summarized and its quantification methods were reevaluated based on a wide-ranging data base of some 3200 measurements. A set of three unified whole-flow-regime dimensionless correlations for volumetric liquid- and gas-side mass transfer coefficients, and gas–liquid interfacial area, each of which spanned four-order-of-magnitude intervals, were derived. The correlations involved combination of artificial neural networks and dimensional analysis. The dimensionless interfacial area, Sh L and Sh G were expressed as a function of the most pertinent dimensionless groups: Re L , Re G , We L , We G , Sc L , Sc G , St L , X G , Mo L , Fr L , Eo m , S b .