Chemical Engineering & Technology, Vol.31, No.7, 1031-1034, 2008
Interrelation of flooding and complete dispersion in agitated gas-liquid contactors
Despite the fact that the complete dispersion characteristics in agitated gas-liquid contactors are operationally important, the flooding-loading transition is widely used as a design criterion, due to its experimental convenience and accuracy. Moreover, limited data are available in the literature on the interrelation of the flooding-loading and the loading-complete dispersion transitions, although several investigators have worked on these two transition stages. Thus, knowledge of the interrelation between these two stages would be of theoretical and practical importance. In this work, the dependence of the stirrer speed at complete dispersion, n(CD), on the stirrer speed at flooding, n(F), was experimentally studied, in coalescing and non-coalescing systems, using Rushton turbines of two different diameters. The experimental results, having an accuracy of < 5 %, are given in the form of a dimensionless correlation.