Gas-liquid interfacial mass transfer in trickle-bed reactors:
State-of-the-art correlations

Ion Iliuta*, Faïçal Larachi (corresponding author), Bernard P.A. Grandjean
Department of Chemical Engineering & CERPIC, Laval University, Québec, Canada G1K 7P4
*on leave from Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Industrial Chemistry,
University Politehnica of Bucharest, Polizu 1, 78126 Bucharest, Romania
Gabriel Wild
Laboratoire des Sciences du Génie Chimique, CNRS-ENSIC
1 Rue Grandville, BP 451, 54001 Nancy, France

Chem. Eng. Sci., 54, 5633-5645 (1999) 

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Abstract:    The state-of-the-art of the gas-liquid mass transfer characteristics intrickle-bed reactors was summarized and its quantification methods were re- evaluated based on a wide-ranging data base of some 3200 measurements.  A set of three unified whole-flow-regime dimensionless correlations for volumetric liquid- and gas-side mass transfer coefficients, and gas-liquid interfacial area, each of which spanned four-order-of-magnitude intervals, were derived.  These correlations involved combination of artificial neuralnetworks and dimensional analysis.  The dimensionless interfacial area, ShL and ShG were expressed as a function of the most pertinent dimensionless groups: Re_L, Re_G, We_L, We_G, Sc_L, Sc_G, St_L, X_G, Mo_L, Fr_L, Eo_m, Sb.

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ERRATA: Expressions for U₄ and U₅ in Equation 8 of Table 3 should be read as:
U₄=log(X_G / 2.328 10^-3) / 4.359   and     U₅=log(Sc_G/ 8.288 10^-7) / 0.55765

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 You can get the aklkg.zip   file  to compute
        - the liquid  Sherwood number
        - the gas Sherwood number
        - the ratio 
The zip file contains the following source codes:
            -  Fortran
            - QuickBasic
            - Excel worksheet

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You may also download our  Excel worksheet Trickle-bed simulator to simulate mass transfer, pressure drop, liquid holdup and flow regime transition. 

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The neural correlation was developped with the software NNFit