Structured packings are deployed in thermal process engineering. They are operated in a counter current flow, where a liquid and a gaseous Phase are present. Of particular importance is the information about the pressure loss in dependence of the operating condition. The gas phase is the major contributor to the pressure loss. Furthermore the flow condition of the gas phase within the structured packing must be known in order to evaluate the conditions for mass transfer. In order to investigate the structured packings in terms of fluid dynamics within the scope of this Master‘s Thesis, there are simulations conducted with the CFD Tool MGLET. The discretization in space is done with a finite volume method of second order and a Runga- Kutta scheme of third order is used for time integration. An immersed boundary method is applied to integrate a Model of the structured packing into the numerical grid. Periodic boundary conditions are applied to the inlet and the outlet boundaries of the computational domain. Air is chosen as gas for the simulations. Turbulent flows are simulated with direct numerical simulatiion (DNS). To validate the applied CFD Software concerning its convergence for the present flow pro- blem, a grid study is conducted. The primary objective is to discuss the relation between pressure loss and average velocity of the gas. This relation depends on the flow condition, conseqently laminar and turbulent flows are investigated. The results match with the theoretics of fluid mechanics. Hence the increase in pressure loss is much higher in turbulent flows than in laminar flows, depending on the average flow velocity of the gas. In addition concurrent results can be assessed, by comparing three different sizes of the computational domain, each with two different grid resolutions. The transition range is narrowed by the calculated data. It can be shown, that complex geometry and complex gas flow within the structured packing can be described by applying CFD.
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Structured packings are deployed in thermal process engineering. They are operated in a counter current flow, where a liquid and a gaseous Phase are present. Of particular importance is the information about the pressure loss in dependence of the operating condition. The gas phase is the major contributor to the pressure loss. Furthermore the flow condition of the gas phase within the structured packing must be known in order to evaluate the conditions for mass transfer. In order to investigate...
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