Study On Liquid Flow Characteristics Of Structured Corrugation Foam Packing Sheets

As a novel porous medium material,SiC foam has a variety of excellent properties,such as high porosity,high specific area,attractive thermal stability,and good mechanical performance.Applied in distillation field,Structured Corrugation Foam Packing(SCFP)was successfully developed in our previous study.SCFP sheets with different types are considered as the study object in this article.Four kinds of visualization technologies are investigated in order to determine the suitable research method for SiC foam material.A novel experimental setup using a high-speed camera equipped by a micro lens is built,for recording the real time liquid flow behaviors in the SCFP sheets.The images are processed by the software of Image Pro-plus and compared with those of two classical structured packing sheets.Two hypotheses on the possible liquid flow patterns in the SCFP sheets are proposed.On the base of experimental results,a combination of liquid film and quasi-wall flow is verified as the unique liquid flow pattern in the SCFP sheets.Wetted holes and non-wetted holes in the SCFP sheets are investigated respectively.The experimental results show that the hole-filling process can be interpreted as the transition process from the quasi-wall flow pattern to the liquid film pattern,which consists of three stages(non-wetted,half-wetted and fully-wetted).The locations non-wetted holes under steady state are approximately fixed.The numbers of non-wetted holes decreases with increasing of the liquid flow rate.Besides,the liquid transport characteristics of the SCFP unit are studied and compared with two classical packing sheets.The comparison results demonstrate that under the same liquid flow rate,SCFP sheets have better liquid transport ability than classical packing sheets.The study demonstrates that unique three-dimensional network structure makes SCFP realize outstanding liquid dispersion and transport ability,also explains its high mass transfer efficiency,which suggests its broad application prospect.