Gas-Liquid Effective Interfacial Area in a Rotating Packed Bed

Stainless steel wire mesh packing is widely used for experimental and industrial applications in rotating packed beds (RPBs) for gas-liquid contacting because it has a higher mass-transfer performance than other conventional packings. In this work, the gas-liquid effective interfacial area of a conventional RPB was studied with eight types of stainless steel wire mesh packings, consisting of four different stainless steel fibers. Gas-liquid chemisorption with CO2 in NaOH solution was employed to measure the effective interfacial area for all types of packings with different rotational speeds and gas-liquid ratios. An empirical correlation that takes the effects of the fiber diameter and opening size of the wire mesh into consideration was proposed for the calculation of the gas-liquid effective interfacial area of stainless steel wire mesh packings in a conventional RPB.