Investigation of bubble breakup and coalescence in a packed-bed reactor - Part 2: Development of a new bubble breakup and coalescence model

A mechanistic model of bubble breakup and coalescence has been developed for a packed bed. Bubble breakup and coalescence models are developed for two coalescence and three breakup mechanisms by taking account of geometry effects and local flow conditions. The bubble size distribution estimated with the present bubble breakup and coalescence models are compared with the experimental data. Change of bubble size distributions along the axial direction is studied with the median bubble size. Median bubble size as a function of the axial location is estimated under two inlet flow conditions: (1) bubble breakup dominated flow and (2) bubble coalescence dominated flow. The predictions of the median bubble size with the present model result in the best among other existing bubble breakup and coalescence models. However, the prediction of the median bubble size for the bubble coalescence dominated flow is still significantly larger than the experimental data. Breakup and coalescence coefficients need to be adjusted in order to predict more accurate bubble size distributions and median bubble size for both flow conditions. For the bubble breakup dominated flow, the breakup and coalescence coefficients are found to be 0.35 and 0.4, respectively. For the bubble coalescence dominated flow, the breakup and coalescence coefficients are found to be 0.35 and 0.01, respectively.(C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.