Sensitivity study of bubble diameter for prediction of flow pattern in homogeneous bubble column regime

Abstract

Determining the bubble diameter size in a bubble column rector plays an important role to accurately predict flow pattern in a bubble column reactor. This paper employs the Eulerian-Eulerian method to numerically investigate the sensitivity study of bubble diameter size in a cylindrical bubble column reactor. Existing experimental results in the literature are used to validate the implementation of the proposed numerical method. In our simulation various bubble diameter size (i.e., 3-5.5mm) are used to find an appropriate bubble size inside the bubble column when the regime is homogeneous (superficial gas velocity = 0.005m/s). The result shows that bubble diameter 4mm is a reasonable size for flow pattern prediction inside the column.