Interfacial area in a packed-bed reactor operating in trickle flow regime

Packed-bed reactors are widely used in petroleum and petrochemical industrials which mostly operate in trickle flow mode. To evaluate the interfacial area in the trickling flow regime, the local film thickness and the shape of the interface are needed. The local film thickness and the shape of the interface are found using the non-dimensional analysis and the simplified geometry of a packed-bed reactor and measuring the film thickness by the electrical conductivity probes. The interfacial area predicted by the model is comparable with that of the other empirical correlations. The interfacial area concentration increases as the flow regime moves from low-interaction to high-interaction flow regime. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 2006 AIChE Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA 11/12-17/2006).