Assessment of the Resilience against Liquid Maldistribution of Monolith Packings under Offshore Floating Conditions

The study provides insights for adapting commercially available packings to work on floating vessels in the marine context aiming at preserving performances similar to land-based packed-bed reactors. Specifically, liquid distribution for cocurrent gas–liquid downflow (Ug = 0.0065–0.131 m/s and Ul = 0.001–0.0078 m/s) inside monolith packings embarked on a hexapod emulator was compared against glass-bead containing trickle bed and open-cell foam packings using wire-mesh sensors under vertical, inclined, and rolling column conditions. Sensitivity of the tested internals with regard to liquid maldistribution was diagnosed and analyzed in terms of a maldistribution factor for the vertical/inclined and rolling columns. Liquid maldistribution was found to prevail at high gas and low liquid superficial velocities for the tested three packings regardless of column conditions. Monolith packed beds demonstrated superior robustness to counteract liquid maldistribution induced by bed static inclinations and roll motions. The glass-bead packed bed was susceptive to column inclination and rolling and suffered appreciable gas/liquid stratified flow leading to a loss of transverse liquid uniformity. Open-cell coarse foams equally failed as they were unable to preserve a homogeneous liquid distribution due to their poor radial spreading.