Novel Pressure Drop Model for Packed Bed Contacting Devices

The pressure drop of fluid flow through packed bed contacting devices or reactors plays a significant role in designing and operating these contacting devices. Hence, during the past decades, many efforts have been made to propose semiempirical correlations for accurately estimating packed bed pressure drop. Nevertheless, the proposed relations could not predict the packed bed pressure drop satisfactorily and deviate significantly from experimental data. To overcome the shortcomings of previously reported relations, in this article, a comprehensive review of the pressure drop models has been conducted, and the strengths and weaknesses of the existing models have been discussed in detail. Then, a new tortuosity model has been developed. This model has been incorporated into a modified Ergun’s model to overcome the shortcomings of previously reported models. To adjust the parameters of the developed model, experimental investigation and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation have been conducted to evaluate the pressure drop model predictions across the experimental setup. In addition, the developed model predictions have been compared against many experimental data reported in the literature, and excellent agreement has been obtained over particle Reynolds number values from 0.2 to 12,000 in the viscous and inertial flow regimes and various bed-to-particle diameter ratios. Moreover, the performance capability of the developed model has been assessed against the existing models reported in the literature, and we found that this model provides the best predictions over a wide range of particle Reynolds number values with the lowest root-mean-square error (RMSE) values.