Let’s be Safer By Making Process Safety Feel More like Personal Safety

The sieve tray has been in the market place as a distillation device for many decades. It has been used extensively on distillation tray equipment worldwide as a highly efficient vapor/liquid-contacting device. Many people have examined dry tray pressure drop data for sieve tray decks including both authors. The primary author has published a recent paper correlating the data into an equation. However, he had left the “door open” for additional refinement of this correlation for those applications that might have high tray thickness to hole diameter ratios (e.g. tiny hole applications in aluminum as had been practiced in air separations). The secondary author made two more recent presentations on this very subject employing both simulator data and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for very thick trays. This current paper will combine all three into a single definitive correlation for the dry tray pressure drop of sieve trays. A correlation for sieve tray pressure drop is presented that incorporates the effects of tray thickness, sieve hole diameter and open area and is compared to data.