Allowing optical measurements in a 3D packed bed with gas flow: A novel reactor concept

Industrial processes based on packed beds with gaseous flow come with high energy and resource consumption. To gain a better understanding of these phenomena, it is essential to investigate flow properties inside such systems. This study presents a novel reactor concept that allows for direct optical measurements inside the voids of the packing. It is based on polyhedral parallel arranged particles in a modular way. Through the modularity different regular and irregular configurations can be generated allowing for direct optical access avoiding major distortion. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is applied to obtain spatially and temporally highly resolved 2D flow fields of the ambient temperature gas flow through the packing. Two different particle Reynolds numbers (100 and 1000) are investigated to validate the concept of the novel reactor model. The successful application of PIV to the inner pores of the bed, delivering reliable snapshot based data, mean velocity and turbulent kinetic energy of the gas flow, shows the potential of this reactor concept also for other optical measurement techniques that allow for the validation of numerical models and simulations of packed bed reactors. • Novel packed bed reactor model for optical measurements in-between polyhedral particles. • Modular reactor permitting regular or irregular arrangements of particles. • Velocity measurements by PIV for particle Reynolds numbers in laminar and turbulent regime.