Effect of counter current gas phase on liquid film

Abstract

Liquid film flow is very important in many industrial applications. However, there are few reports about its characteristics on structured packings. Therefore, in this paper, liquid film phenomena were investigated experimentally to exploit new approaches for intensifying the performance of the structured packings. All experiments were performed at room temperature. Water and air were the working fluids. The effect of counter current gas phase on the liquid film was taken into consideration. A high speed camera, a non-intrusive measurement technique, was used. It is shown that both liquid and gas phases have strong effects on film characteristics. In the present work, liquid film width increased by 57% because of increasing liquid flow rate, while it decreased by 25% resulting from the counter current gas phase.