Recently, total reflux experiments have been carried out with a number of common and high performance corrugated sheet structured packings, using facilities available at SRP, University of Texas at Austin (0.17 to 4.14 bar pressure, cyclohexane/n-heptane, internal diameter 0.43 m, packed height up to 3.5 m), Delft University of Technology (atmospheric pressure, cyclohexane/n-heptane, internal diameter 0.45 m, packed height up to 2 m) and at Bayer Technology Services (0.1 bar and 1 bar pressure, chlorobenzene/ethylbenzene, internal diameter 0.6 m, packed height up to 4 m). As expected the pressure drop of the packing increases and capacity decreases with increasing operating pressure, irrespective of the test system. However, the mass transfer efficiency seems to be affected by the nature of the system. In case of the CH/nH system, the efficiency tends to increase with increasing operating pressure, while with CB/EB system there is no effect at all or there is an opposite effect. The latter suggests that packing size could also play a role, or, which is difficult to accept, presence of some peculiar (undetected) effect during that particular experiment. The observed test system dependence of mass transfer efficiency imposes certain difficulties with respect to applicability of a modeling approach striving to avoid use of any empirical, packing and/or system specific constants. The related problems will be discussed using a versatile predictive model developed in Delft to enable predicting the performance of structured packing based on variations in macro geometric characteristics of the corrugated sheets only, which proved to be capable of predicting geometry related effects on pressure drop side accordingly, but exhibits difficulties in following observed mass transfer trends.

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