Hydraulic Simulation of Bubble Flow in Bubble Column Reactor

Abstract

Bubble column reactor are commonly used in a wide variety of applications, such as gas-liquid and gas-liquid-solid in plenty of chemical, petrochemical and biochemical industries. They supply many advantages while operating and maintenance such as high heat and mass transfer rates, compactness and low operating and maintenance cost. It is a critical to understand the complexity of the fluid dynamics in bubble column reactors due to its wide application in process engineering. This research shows the bubble column flows and provides mean velocity profile for columns operated over a wide range of superficial velocity, operating pressure, physical properties, and column diameter. The possible ways to conduct such research is by performing the experimental method and software simulation method. The experimental setup is usually expensive to run, while the software simulation by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an alternative approach to evaluate the characteristics of bubble column reactor and it cost less than the experimental measurements.