Computational fluid dynamics studies of dry and wet pressure drops in structured packings

Computational fluid dynamics was used to study the hydrodynamic of structured packings. The results showed that the k–ω was a suitable turbulence model for analyzing the flows in structured packings. A simple method was proposed for evaluating the liquid holdup based on the Iliuta and Larachi (2001) model [25], the calculated liquid film thickness in 2D framework, and the empirical correlation of Brito et al. (1994) [26]. The presented method can be used for estimating the wet pressure drop in 3D structured packings for loading region with good accuracy as well as computational economy. The process of liquid film formation was also discussed.