(351an) Understanding of Fluid Flow Characteristics in Macrocellular Foam Materials for Enhanced Distillation Process

Due to macrocellular foam materials have great application prospects in medium-low pressure drop with low liquid load operation, it has been a hot spot in this field to explore the liquid phase flow inside the pores of macrocellular foam materials. The previous research found that under certain operating conditions, when liquid phase flows through the macrocellular foam porous channels, liquid phase special flow pattern will form in the SiC open-cell foam porous channels. The liquid-phase special flow pattern increases the residence time of the liquid in the packing and enhances the reaction efficiency between the liquid phases. Therefore, applications using macrocellular foam material as distillation packing or trays have demonstrated higher performance than classical mass transfer units, except for the operation range. To overcome these disadvantages of classical units, a series of many novel mass transfer units based on the macrocellular foam materials have been developed, such as Foam Monolithic Tray, Foam Ring Random Packing (FRRP), Structured Corrugation Foam Packing (SCFP) and so on. In this paper, the hydrodynamic performances and mass transfer efficiency of a series novel mass transfer units are examined in lab-scale equipment, with special emphasis on the effect of the foam cell size and sheet thickness. In general, based on the comparison with the traditional novel mass transfer units, the experimental results indicate that the hydrodynamics and mass transfer performances of novel mass transfer units meet the requirements for the mass transfer elements with high theoretical stages and low pressure drop in the distillation column.