Experimental Evaluation of Heat Transfer through Different Shape Packed Bed

Packed beds, due to their high surface area-to-volume ratio, are widely used in a variety of industries, such as catalytic reactors, absorption towers, packed bed regenerators, high temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactors and heat accumulators, etc. Heat transfer in packed bed gas-solid systems is an important operation in the chemical process industries. It is obvious that an extensive knowledge and thorough understanding of the heat transfer phenomena in the bed is essential for the successful design of such systems.In this experiment the macroscopic hydrodynamic and heat transfer characteristics in some novel structured packed beds (SC and BCC) will be studied, where the packing of ellipsoidal or non-uniform spherical particles will be investigate for the first time with experiments and some important results will be obtained. For present experiments, the interstitial heat transfer coefficient in the packed bed will be determined using an inverse method of transient single-blow technique. The effects of packing form and particle shape will be investigated. Furthermore, it will be revealed that, both the effects of packing form and particle shape are significant to the macroscopic hydrodynamic and heat transfer characteristics in structured packed beds. With proper selection of packing form, such as Simple Cubic packing (SC), Body Cantered Cubic packing (BCC), the pressure drops in the structured packed beds can be greatly reduced and the overall heat transfer performances will be improved. These experimental results would be reliable and useful for the optimum design in industry applications.