A corrugation geometry based model for efficiency of structured distillation packing

Although the structured packing is a well established gas-liquid contacting device, the understanding of its function is insufficient and often leads to poor exploitation of the available phase separating potential. This is a consequence of a rather superficial approach to modelling the packing perf ormance through the years resulting in a lack of information on the nature and extent of interaction between counter-currently flowing gas and liquid phases and the micro and macro geometry of a rather ordered structure with a pronounced flow discontinuity at the transition among packing elements. T his paper addresses the relation between the fluid-dynamics imposed by pack ing geometry and the mass transfer efficiency, and introduces a performance prediction method which does not require packing specific constants to des cribe mass transfer coefficients of phases. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.