Eulerian modeling of reactive gas-liquid flow in a bubble column

Despite the widespread application of bubble columns and intensive research efforts devoted to understand their complex behavior, detailed knowledge on the fluid flow, mass transfer and chemical reactions as well as their interactions is currently very limited. Gas-liquid flow in bubble column reactors is characterized by a combination of inherently unsteady complex processes with widely varying spatial and temporal scales. The complicated interactions between the gas and the liquid phases comprising hydrodynamics, mass transfer and chemical reaction cause many challenging modeling problems to be solved. The Euler–Euler model is adopted throughout this thesis to investigate gas-liquid flow in bubble columns. In this study, efforts have been focused on the assessment of suitable closure laws for interfacial forces and for turbulence in the continuous phase. Furthermore, gas-liquid heterogeneous flow and reactive gas-liquid flows have been studied. All the numerical simulations were carried out with the commercial CFD package CFX-4.4 and all simulation results were compared with the available experimental PIV data of Deen (2001).