Engineering Commons^™

Hydrodynamics And Mass Transfer In Bubble Columns, Onkar N. Manjrekar

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Bubble columns and slurry bubble columns are multiphase reactors used for a wide range of applications in the biochemical, chemical, petrochemical, and metallurgical industries. In spite of their widespread usage, the scale-up of bubble columns remains an ongoing challenge. Various scale-up approaches, based on concepts ranging from ideal mixing to complex 3-D multiphase CFD models, have been used for assessing the effect of column size and gas and liquid flow rates on column hydrodynamics and reactor performance. Among these approaches, phenomenological models based on either single-class or multi-class bubbles that were validated on cold flow systems have been successful in …