CFD Study of Sieve Tray Dry Pressure Drops

In the chemical processing industry, sieve trays are often used for distillation and absorption columns, but there are few dry pressure drop data available from industrial-sized sieve trays.   This paper presents computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and experimental studies of dry pressure drops with commercial-sized sieve trays.  The sieve trays studied have the same configurations as the trays used in industrial columns.  The effects of hole diameter and deck thickness were investigated using various sieve tray designs.   Dry pressure drop predictions from the CFD simulations showed excellent agreement with the dry pressure drop data.  CFD simulations showed the velocities were not uniformly distributed across the column cross-section due to the effect of jetting from the deck orifice.  Orifice discharge coefficients, derived from the CFD simulations and experimental data, were also compared with those published in literature.   In general, the measured and calculated orifice coefficients were higher than the literature model predictions.