Random trilobe packing using rigid body approach and local Gas-Liquid hydrodynamics simulation through CFD with experimental validation

It is quite difficult to measure the local information of the gas/liquid flow inside random packed extrudate catalyst beds in a large scale. Obtaining the local information through computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations in such system is also difficult due to the complexity of random particle packing and two-phase flow simulation. An efficient packing scheme was implemented to randomly pack 2917 trilobe particles (10 cm in height) in a 2-inch column to represent the trickle bed reactor (TBR) based on the rigid body approach. The generated geometry was used to define the computational domain for the two-phase hydrodynamics simulation based on the volume of fluids (VOF) approach. This hydrodynamics modelling study is paired with an experimental study using our in-house developed advanced measurement techniques based on optical fiber probes, which allowed to determine local liquid velocity and saturation profiles. The experimental measurements were used for local validation of the implemented model.