Influence of corrugation geometry on the performance of structured packings: an experimental study

Abstract

While the utilisation of corrugated sheet structured packings is well established, these gas–liquid-contacting devices are still not well understood. A contributing reason is the rather limited publicly available performance data, most of which have been obtained from relatively small columns. A recent comparison of data from the 1.2 m Fractionation Research, Incorporated (FRI) and from the 0.43 m Separations Research Program (SRP) columns show excellent agreement based on equivalent packings. This is significant since the FRI column is considered to be of industrial scale. As a result, we sought to create an expanded data base emphasising packing geometric variations, using packings from a single manufacturer (J. Montz). Hydraulic characteristics of the same packings had been studied previously using air–water simulators at TU Delft. Total reflux distillation experiments were carried out at SRP using a bed height of 3.3 m for all packings. The cyclohexane– n-heptane system was utilized because of the availability of comparative data. The operating pressure was varied from 0.33 to 4.14 bar, to determine the effect of physical properties. The resulting data provided insight into the nature and effect of corrugation angle, specific surface area, and surface texture on pressure drop, capacity and efficiency. In this paper we report the results and also discuss the implications of the observations on model development and design.