Two-Phase Flow Pattern Measurements on a 1m Distillation Tray

Even after a century of tray technology research, the flow on distillation trays is still not fully understood. A method to investigate the flow distribution on 1m diameter chordal downcomer trays during operation is presented. The method is based on high frequency sampling of a temperature tracer. The technology, the evaluation method  and several results are shown. The measured results are compared to a full-scale two-phase CFD simulation run on a high performance cluster