Particle Scale Liquid Spreading in Trickle Bed Reactors

I performed simulations in HPC-computing facility of IITD, the 4th fastest supercomputer in India. With emission norms getting more and more stringent, it has become important to improve the performance of trickle bed reactors to produce better fuel quality with sulphur content less than 10 ppm (e.g. ultra-low sulphur diesel). Significant efforts were made to develop computational models to predict the local liquid distribution in trickle beds, however, the present state of the literature shows the predictive abilities of Eulerian multiphase models used to simulate local liquid distribution in large-scale trickle beds overwhelmingly depend on the closure models, which are used to estimate the interphase momentum exchange terms, capillary pressure force and mechanical dispersion force. It is not clear from the existing models how the magnitude of the aforementioned parameters depend on particle size/shape, bed voidage, packing structure, particle wetting characteristics and liquid properties. The development of improved closures is limited by the understanding of particle-scale liquid spreading behavior. Thus, in the present work, we have performed Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) simulations to understand the effects of particle size/shape, bed voidage, packing structure, particle wetting characteristics and liquid properties on particle-scale liquid spreading behaviour.

I was invited to present this work at the International Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering (ISCRE25). Click here to get a glimpse of the work. I also presented my work in Open House IIT Delhi. Click here to see the respective poster.