Investigation of effective parameters on hydrodynamics of rotating packed bed using computational fluid dynamics

Rotating Packed Beds (RPBs) are used in many processes of chemical engineering, such as distillation, absorption, production of nanoparticles, natural gas sweetening, and etc. The fluid flow analysis in this equipment is necessary to obtain the hydrodynamic information and investigation of transport phenomena. In this paper, 3D simulation of single phase and two phase flows are carried out using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The effect of some parameters such as rotational speed, gas and liquid flow rates, number of rotor holes, fixed and moving baffle are investigated on the pressure drop. The single phase flow analysis showed that the tangential velocity has the most effect on the velocity magnitude comparison with the radial and axial velocities. The simulation results showed that dry and wet pressure drop increase with increasing gas flow rate as the average errors between experimental data and simulation results with and without baffle are 5.3% and 3.6%, respectively. It was also known that increasing liquid flow rate has negligible effect on the pressure drop. It was seen that wet pressure drop increases with increasing both rotational speed and rotor holes. The moving baffle insertion into the bed was caused that wet pressure drop decreases 14%.