Investigation of liquid flow morphology inside a structured packing using X-ray tomography

In this work X-ray tomography is used to analyse the influence of liquid viscosity on liquid flow in a column filled with Mellapak Plus 752Y structured packing. Tomographic measurements are performed at various column heights for different liquid flow rates. Water and glycerine aqueous solutions are successively used as working liquids in order to quantify the influence of liquid viscosity on hydrodynamic quantities such as liquid hold-up and gas-liquid interfacial area. As expected, both liquid hold-up and gas-liquid interfacial area increase with liquid flow rate. An increase of liquid viscosity has also a positive impact on liquid hold-up and on gas-liquid interfacial area. In all cases, the measured quantities are not constant along the bed height, leading to fluctuating axial profiles. Furthermore, tomographic images are used to identify different liquid flow patterns (films, contact-point liquid, flooded regions) in the irrigated cross section images. A method based on morphological techniques is proposed to quantify the fraction of liquid flow within each flow pattern depending on flow rate and liquid viscosity