CFD SIMULATION OF MULTIPHASE FLOW IN A SIEVE TRAY OF A DISTILLATION COLUMN

Many studies on distillation columns are based on macroscopic models of mass and energy conservation. In this work, we investigate the complex hydrodynamics of sieve trays in pilot plant distillation columns, based on a distributed control system with heating action at intermediate points, by means of electrical resistance heaters arranged on the surface of sieve trays (Marangoni and Machado, 2007; Werle, 2007), using computational fluid dynamics. The main objective was to evaluate the influence of the electrical resistance heaters on the hydrodynamics of the sieve trays. A three-dimensional mathematical homogeneous biphasic model was implemented in the commercial code of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), CFX 11 (AEA Technology) for numerical experimentation studies. The results show the influence of electrical resistance heaters placed on the sieve trays on the flow patterns, although the hydrodynamics is not affected as a whole. Consequently, this helped to provide enhanced mixing and homogenization in the region with active bubbles, and thus the use of electrical resistance heaters could be applied in a distributed control system approach.

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