Gas–Liquid Effective Interfacial Area in a Rotating Packed Bed

Stainless steel wire mesh packing is widely used for experimental and industrial applications in rotating packed beds (RPBs) for gas–liquid contacting because it has a higher mass-transfer performance than other conventional packings. In this work, the gas–liquid effective interfacial area of a conventional RPB was studied with eight types of stainless steel wire mesh packings, consisting of four different stainless steel fibers. Gas–liquid chemisorption with CO2 in NaOH solution was employed to measure the effective interfacial area for all types of packings with different rotational speeds and gas–liquid ratios. An empirical correlation that takes the effects of the fiber diameter and opening size of the wire mesh into consideration was proposed for the calculation of the gas–liquid effective interfacial area of stainless steel wire mesh packings in a conventional RPB.