2-PHASE FRICTIONAL PRESSURE-DROP IN FLOODED-BED REACTORS - A STATE-OF-THE-ART CORRELATION

A state-of-the-art correlation for the prediction of frictional gas-li quid pressure drop in cocurrent upflow fixed bed reactors was derived based on a wide hydrodynamic data bank of flooded packed-bed reactors. The data bank, which contains more than 3400 measurements, was constr ucted using information collected from 22 sources over the past 40 yea rs. The correlation, which relied upon combination of dimensional anal ysis and artificial feed-forward neural networks, was expressed as a t wo-phase friction factor function of the five most pertinent dimension less groups (Re-LG, Mo, St, Fr-L, X-L) The prediction and generalizati on capabilities of the proposed correlation and the limits of existing literature correlations and models were demonstrated by systematic st atistical tests over the constructed data bank.