Pressure Drop in Concurrent Gas–Liquid Upflow Through Packed Beds

Separate correlations were proposed to predict a two-phase frictional pressure drop for the three identified flow regimes, namely bubble flow, pulse flow, and spray flow for the concurrent gas–liquid upflow through the packed bed from the large experimental data. In this work, the gas–liquid systems studied are air–water, air-56% glycerol, and air-monoethanolamin; the column packing investigated are Raschig rings, Intalox saddles, and ceramic spheres of two sizes. Liquid flow rates were varied from 3.53 to 43.92 kg/(m2s) and air flow rates from 0.265 to 1.768 kg/(m2s). It is noted that pressure drop increases with an increase in gas and liquid flow rates, which is consistent with literature findings. It is observed that pressure drop is higher for the system with high liquid viscosity, and it is also observed that pressure drop is influenced by the combined effect of packing particle size, shape, and porosity of the beds. These correlations predicted the pressure drop of the current experimental data (1150 data points) and literature data (770 data points) with an RMS deviation of 12.8%.