Influence of Nozzle Numbers on Analysis of Air- Water Flow in a Rotating Packed Bed with Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

Nowadays, rotating packed beds (RPBs) have been adopted in the many chemical processes such as absorption, desorption, distillation, and etc. Due to the complex structure of RPBs, Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) is adopted for analyzing air-water flow in the RPB. In this work, increasing nozzle from 2 to 8 on the behavior of air and water flows was investigated and validated with the experimental data with deviations less than 14%. The obtained results of RPB with packing and baffles demonstrated that increasing nozzle from 2 to 6 increased air velocity vectors. Also, increasing nozzle from 2 to 6 in the RPB with packing uniformed the water velocity on the rotor and housing. In the end, RPB with baffles increased momentum of water velocity vectors and velocity gradient on the rotor and housing. The obtained results showed that the RPB with 6 nozzles have the uniform air flow pattern rather than other nozzle design. Also, in the RPB with baffles; flooding occurred in all sections of the RPB with 8 nozzles. Furthermore, velocity vectors of the outer edge rotor were larger than the inner edge rotor in the RPB with packing and baffles.

Keywords

• rpb
• cfd
• analysis of air-water
• flooding
• uniform flow pattern