PREDICTION OF FLOW DISTRIBUTIONS AND PRESSURE CHANGES IN MULTILAYEREDANNULAR PACKED-BEDS

Annular packed bed configurations are used in many different systems a nd the radial packing region is not always composed of a single layer of material. This work is based on a commercial air filter which was f ound to have several different layers within the radially packed regio n, comprising a particulate filter and an activated carbon layer as th e main flow resistances. To enable modelling of such a filter, an exis ting model has been extended to predict flow distributions and pressur e profiles for annular packed bed systems. The enhanced model predicts the trends and orders of magnitude of experimentally obtained pressur e profiles and overall pressure drops for three air flow rates through a commercial air filter.