Abstract

An experimental study was conducted to determine the pressure drop characteristics of cylindrical packed beds through which turbulent pipe flow passing. This study was planned to clarify the applicability of the well-known Ergun’s correlation proposed for the beds composed with spherical particles on the beds with non-spherical particles. The experimental packed beds were constructed by using two different irregular-shape and one spherical-shape packing materials for understanding the effects of particle shape or sphericity, particle size, bed porosity, and bed length to diameter ratio on the pressure drop. The beds were constructed by using zeolite, chickpea, and glass bead materials to cover the particle sphericity range of 0.55≤Φ≤1.00. Systematic experiments and data analysis procedure showed that the well-known Ergun’s correlation can be applied to all of the experimental beds composed with non-spherical and/or spherical particles with a maximum deviation of ±20%. This deviation can however be decreased to a negligible level of ±4%, if some simple modifications, including the use of particle Reynolds number, Re_p, a new form of particle friction factor, f^*_p, and some adopted empirical constants in the well-known Ergun’s correlation, are carried.