Experimental Investigation of Bubble Column Reactors with Longitudinal Flow Heat Exchanging Internals Using Ultrafast X-Ray Tomography

Bubble column reactors are multiphase devices which are commonly applied in the chemical process industry due to their advantageous heat and mass transfer properties as well as the abstinence of moving parts. Since most of the reactions operated in these devices are of exothermic nature, the developed heat has to be sufficiently removed off the system in order the guarantee optimal reaction conditions. One, among others, of those heat exchanging devices can be internally inserted tube bundles, which have the advantage to remove the heat directly at its source. On the downside, a large portion of the reactor's cross-sectional area has to be covered by the tube bundle, whereas typical values range between 20 and 30%. Hence, the influence of the internals is not negligible and has a strong effect on the global and local hydrodynamics. Therefore, the influence of various tube bundle layouts (square and triangular pitch) with two tube sizes (8 and 13 mm) having the same coverage of the reactor's cross-sectional area (~25%) have been investigated using the ultrafast X-ray CT to get insight into the local and global hydrodynamics. A cylindrical column with 10 cm ID and a height of 2m was used. Furthermore, to cover all hydrodynamic flow regimes, the superficial gas velocity was varied between 2 – 20 cm/s. It has been found out that the tube configuration has strong impact on the radial holdup profile, which governs the liquid mixing and gas velocity profile. Furthermore, square configurations showed better hydrodynamic performance regarding holdup, holdup profiles and bubble size distribution.