Experimental Investigation of Flow Regimes and Pressure Buildup Due to Fines Deposition in Trickle-Bed Reactor

We present a two-dimensional experimental visualization of the inter-play between flow regimes and fines deposition in trickle bed reactors (TBR) in pursuit of mitigation of the pressure buildup problem. We designed and built a 2D experimental cell to investigate the TBR flow regimes. The cell consists of two parallel quartz plates separated by cylindrical spacers or filled with few layers of spherical glass beads of varying diameters to simulate medium porosity and permeability. An injection manifold is use to inject co-current downward flow of gas and liquid at varying liquid and/or gas flowrates. The cell is illuminated from behind by a LED light table while a fast CCD camera captures real time pictures of the two phase flow phenomenon in the medium. The sequence of acquired images is processed using an image processing and enhancement software to characterize the flow regime and/or the flow channels obstruction.