Establishing a Facility for the Hydrodynamic Characterisation of Distillation Column Internals

A better understanding of the hydrodynamics related to flooding conditions in distillation columns is required in order to provide optimised designs for new plants and plant retrofits. Current flooding prediction correlations are predominantly based on air/water systems and tend to diverge at high vapour capacities. In this work an experimental setup was designed and constructed to test the hydrodynamic characteristics of random – and structured packing as well as sieve – and valve trays. The experimental setup is used to develop a better understanding of the influence of gas and liquid properties on entrainment and column flooding. The experimental setup was tested with an air/water system and the tray entrainment data followed the trends from Bennett et al. quite well. The packed column yielded the correct trends on both pressure drop and liquid hold-up data which correlated reasonably well with the general model proposed by Piché et al..