Spreading of a viscous liquid film over the corrugated surface and the heat and mass transfer calculations

Abstract

There are a lot of industrial applications of structured packing. Distillation columns are one of the examples where the liquid flows over the corrugated surface as a thin film to provide a good mass-transfer surface between the liquid and vapor phase. The purpose of the present paper is to study the hydrodynamics and the heat-mass transfer of the liquid film spreading down the corrugated surfaces when the corrugation amplitude is comparable with Nusselt’s film thickness (the amplitude corresponds to a small texture of the structured packing). As a result, a nonlinear type diffusion equation is obtained to describe the evolution of the film thickness profile. The nonlinear diffusion coefficient is obtained for three cases: a smooth inclined plate, a corrugated plate with large ribs, and an inclined corrugated plate with small ribs. The equations are solved numerically. As a result, it has been obtained that the small texture significantly increases the rate of the film thickness evolution in comparison with a smooth plate. To obtain the nonlinear diffusion coefficient in the case of a small texture, the hydrodynamics of the film flow over an inclined corrugated surface are studied. The viscosity, inertia, and surface tension forces are taken into account. The calculations were carried out on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. The influence of the microcorrugations on both the heat transfer from the wall and the mass transfer through the free surface was investigated.