Ternary Mass Transfer in a Wetted Wall Column

2 Ternary Mass Transfer in a Wetted Wall Column 

A set of ternary mass transfer experiments was carried out by Toor and Sebulsky (1961b) and Modine (1963) in a wetted-wall column and also in a packed column. These authors measured the simultaneous rates of transfer between a vapor-gas mixture containing acetone, benzene, and nitrogen or helium, and a binary liquid mixture of acetone and benzene. Vapor and liquid streams were in cocurrent flow in the wetted-wall column and in countercurrent flow in the packed column. Their experimental results show that diffusional interaction effects were significant in the vapor phase, especially for the experiments with helium in the wetted wall column. 

Modine (1963) carried out his experiments in an adiabatic wetted-wall column 0.6096 m in length and 0.025019-m inside diameter. A gas-vapor stream containing acetone (1)-benzene(2)-nitrogen(3) or helium(3) was contacted with a cocurrently flowing liquid stream containing only the first two components. Seven runs were carried out with nitrogen as inert gas and six runs with helium. The experimental results are most accessible in a paper by 

Krishna (1981) for this reason, they are not repeated here. It is worth noting, however, that most of the experiments involve the simultaneous evaporation of benzene and condensation of acetone. The experiments cover a rather narrow range of liquid compositions (mole fraction acetone 0.1) and vapor flow rates (Re numbers 9000). 

A number of investigators used the wetted-wall column data of Modine to test multicomponent mass transfer models (Krishna, 1979, 1981 Furno et al., 1986 Bandrowski and Kubaczka, 1991). Krishna (1979b, 1981a) tested the Krishna-Standart (1976) multicomponent film model and also the linearized theory of Toor (1964) and Stewart and Prober (1964). Furno et al. (1986) used the same data to evaluate the turbulent eddy diffusion model of Chapter 10 (see Example 11.5.3) as well as the explicit methods of Section 8.5. Bandrowski and Kubaczka (1991) evaluated a more complicated method based on the development in Section 8.3.5. The results shown here are from Furno et al. (1986). 

---

Krishna, R., Ternary Mass Transfer in a Wetted-Wall Column—Significance of Diffusional Interactions. I-Stefan Diffusion, Trans. Inst. Chem. Engrs., 59, 35-43 (1981a). 

---