Flow dynamic in a packed bed filled with Ni‐Al₂O₃ porous catalyst: Experimental and numerical approach

Abstract

Numerical simulations and experiments have been carried out to explore the effect of particle shapes on the pressure drop and the loss factor in a packed fixed bed filled with a porous catalyst. The packed bed is presented by the Ni‐Al2O3 catalyst of the different shapes. The commercial program ANSYS Fluent is used for the analysis; more than 20 mln cells are used for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling. The catalyst particles were set as a porous medium with the viscous resistance coefficients and the inertial resistance coefficients. The comparison of the pressure drops between the experimental and simulation results show a good correlation with the divergence of results <8%. To determine the effect of the porosity properties of the medium on the numerical results, two cases of CFD modeling were realized (with taking into account the porous medium properties and without it). The discrepancy between results increases with an increasing gas flow rate.

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