Liquid flow behavior study in SiC foam corrugated sheet using a novel ultraviolet fluorescence technique coupled with CFD simulation

Abstract

The liquid flow behaviors and liquid residence time distribution on different structured SiC foam corrugated sheets are observed experimentally to assess the suitability of the foam structured corrugated packing consisting of SiC foam corrugated sheets. A novel experimental technique using an ultraviolet fluorescence system combined with a HD camera for non-invasive liquid flow behavior measurement has been developed in this article. A model based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach developed in previous work (Li et al., 2011) is used to calculate the liquid flow behaviors and characteristics of residence time for the SiC foam corrugated sheets. Both experimental and numerical results agreed well and demonstrated that the pore size and the extrusion ratio of foam materials played a key role for the liquid flow performance. Finally, the characteristics of flow behaviors obtained from experimental and numerical simulation were compared to the wire mesh sheet. These comparison results showed that SiC-foam sheets have outstanding liquid dispersion capability, which indicates SiC-foam is a promising material for the structured packing.