Hydrodynamics inside packed beds of spherocylinders; Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Pore Network Modelling approaches

Packed bed reactors are one of the central processing units of chemical and petrochemical industries. A detailed understanding of the hydrodynamics of the flow passing through packed bed reactors is of great importance in improving the design and performance of these reactors. One parameter that affects the hydrodynamics inside packed bed reactors is the packing configuration, i.e., the packing size and shape. The influence of the packing structure on the flow becomes more significant in the case of slender packed beds, where the column to particle diameter ratio is small. In this work, two approaches are employed to investigate the hydrodynamics in packed beds of spherocylinders with different aspect ratios: an experimental approach, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and a numerical approach, Pore Network Modelling (PNM). The 3D structure images and the flow fields are obtained using two different sequences of MRI. From the structure images, pore network models are extracted. By implementing the numerical flow analysis on the pore network models, the flow fields are calculated from PNM and compared to the ones from MRI. The comparison shows a good correspondence between PNM and MRI, implying that PNM can describe hydrodynamics well in the slender packed beds of spherocylinders.