Research On the Dynamics of Liquid Film Flowing Down Different Corrugated Wall

Abstract: The packing structure and surface geometry can change the flow pattern, and has significant influence on the mass transfer between liquid film and gas phase in packing column of chemical industry. It is necessary to investigate the flow pattern and factors that affect the tower efficiency. The Packing with different structure including triangular corrugation, trapezoid corrugation, rectangular corrugation and sinusoidal corrugation are investigated in this paper. Computational fluid dynamic simulations based on volume of fluid method by open source software OpenFOAM, are conducted to study the liquid film over these corrugations. It is found that the area of the free surface between liquid and gas reaches its maximum when the resonance phenomenon occurs, and the rectangular corrugation is of biggest free surface. It is also found that liquid film with bigger volume in the trough of corrugations encounters higher resonance Reynolds number, and the free surface has a bigger area in this condition. The obtained conclusions provide a theoretical basis for the study of mass transfer in packing column industry applications.