Effect of packing and liquid conductivity on gas distribution and holdup in reaction column

In the packed reaction column, constant packing is always added to improve contact areas between two phases of chemical or similar processes, such as absorption, stripping, and distillation. In this paper, gas distribution and overall holdup were measured by Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT). The bubble column was packed with or without 6 mm glass beads and liquid conductivity varied from 1.446 mS/cm to 80.1 mS/cm. Experimental results demonstrate that packing structure have stronger impact on gas distribution and overall holdup in the bubble column than the conductivity of aqueous solution. Some similar research findings were reported in literature, which proves ERT is an efficient imaging tool for real-time monitoring and helps to understand complex two-phase flow.

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