Numerical Simulation of Flow in Superpak Family Packings

Abstract

The distillation is currently the most energy-intensive technology of the chemical industry. Commonly, the distillation is performed in the columns filled with a structured packing. Structured packings are complex structures used to increase the size of the interface available for the mass transfer. Because of the high complexity of both the packings and the physical phenomena occurring during the distillation, the design of the distillation columns is still based mostly on empirical data. In this work, we concentrate on modeling the gas flow in the Super-Pak family of structured packings. First, we propose an algorithm for automatic generation of the packing geometry. Next, we construct and validate a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of gas flow through SuperPak 250.Y and SuperPak 350.Y packings. The model validation is done by comparing experimental data of dry pressure losses to the values computed by our model. The obtained difference between the CFD estimates and experiments is bellow 10 %. Finally, we present a parametric study of the SuperPak 250.Y packing geometry. The devised modeling approach may be easily automated and used for optimization of the SuperPak type packing geometry with respect to the gas flow. Furthermore, the proposed CFD model may be extended to account for the multiphase flow.