Evaluation of gas-liquid contact area and liquid holdup of random packing using CFD simulation

This study provided a method to simulate flow field of an irregular arrangement of random packing in an absorber using commercial software, Fluent®. Volume of fluid model was employed in this study to deal with gas and liquid phases contacting issue. Volume of fluid model has validated that it is able to simulate gas and liquid interface. 10 flow fields of small-scale absorbers in which several raschig rings were stacked randomly, were established to evaluate average values of gas-liquid contact area and liquid holdup. The results showed that both of values are increased as liquid velocity increases. The simulated gas-liquid contact area has the same trend with the correlations provided from literature. The simulated liquid holdup completely matches the liquid holdup correlation for traditional absorbers.