Drag reduction in co-current down flow packed column using xanthan gum

Abstract

Drag reduction is one of the most important techniques for reducing energy consumption in a packed bed contactor. The present work involves an experimental investigation on flow regime transition for air-water system with and without drag reducing agent (DRA), two-phase pressure drop, friction factor and drag reduction using xanthan gum as DRA. Drag reduction was quantified from the two-phase pressure drop data. Based on the present observations it was found that the percentage drag reduction increases with an increase in the concentration of DRA and it is only effective in the range of 300 ppm to 800 ppm. The experimental results indicate that a maximum of 80% drag reduction was achievable using xanthan gum (800 ppm) as DRA. Furthermore, the experimental data were validated with the available literature correlations.

Modification of Ergun equation for application in trickle bed reactors randomly packed with trilobe particles using computational fluid dynamics technique

“…Drag force or inter-phase momentum exchange is one important hydrodynamics term of TBRs which should be modeled correctly for accurate design and scale up of this type of reactor [13,14]. In the Ergun equation, drag force is usually expressed as the sum of viscous and inertial terms [15].…”

Pressure Drop and Its Reduction in Trickle Bed Using Xanthan Gum

“…In view of the literature survey, it was discovered that very minute information is available in literature survey, [16,17,18,19,20,21] which is motivated on the impact of xanthan gum as pressing reducing agent in co-current air-water downstream through a trickle bed structure. The xanthan gum acts as a low shear thinning solution.…”