• Film flow
• Light Induced Fluorescence
• Riempimenti Strutturati
• Structured Packings

Hydrodynamics of liquid films flowing over structured packings is of great interest since it plays an important role in establishing the mass transfer efficiency in packed columns. Therefore, investigations including liquid film thickness measurements are carried out and the related outcomes will be included into a cell model, with the intent to estimate the liquid hold up in a real structured packing column.
With the aim to gain a more-in-depth knowledge about film flow development on structured packings materials, a LIF measurement procedure is developed for macrostructured plates which better approximates real flow conditions in columns than flat plates.
Horizontal waves packing surfaces fitted with or without microstructures are considered for this first approach to the issue.
The measurement technique considers the complex surface structure and it is applied with a coupled geometry features identification and mathematical modeling.
A variety of phenomena and effects needs to be taken into account for macrostructured surfaces. Such issues either are not present or can be usually considered as neglectable for flat surfaces. Therefore, a complex post-processing procedure has been developed for the new scope. The resulting procedure includes a film thickness correction algorithm which considers the non-perpendicularity of the camera to the surface. If the correction was not been applied, the depth informations captured by the camera would involve huge errors related to this effect.
The procedure has been validated and applied to film thickness measurements on horizontal waves plates for several liquid flow rates and the resulting profiles have been analyzed.