Modeling of dry pressure drop for fully developed gas flow in structured packing using CFD simulations

Dry pressure drop in columns equipped with structured packings is considered to involve two components: drag force due to the direction changes near the column walls and in the transition region between two packing layers rotated to each other by 90°, and friction force between the different gas flows inside the crossing triangular channels and with the packing solid walls. It is believed that in a packed bed with compact sheet density and large packing surface area (above 250 m²/m³), the major contribution of the pressure drop is generated by the friction component.In this paper, a model is proposed to determine the dry pressure drop friction component. The gas is assumed to establish a fully developed turbulent flow inside the structured packing channels. The structured packing geometry consists of a combination of periodic elements. It is shown that the reproduction of one periodic element aerodynamics leads to determine the gas distribution and pressure drop inside the packed bed. Therefore, modeling the dry pressure drop through one periodic element is a meaningful representation of the dry pressure drop over the packing.CFD simulations are carried out on periodic elements using different turbulence models: RNG k−ε, realizable k−ε, and SST k−ω. The best results that agree with the experimental data in the literature are obtained with the SST k−ω model. The CFD model proposed is used to study the impact of packing geometry variations on the dry pressure drop and to bring up a correlation for the pressure drop with respect to changes of packing geometry: channel height dimension, channel opening angle, and corrugation angle.