Packed bed pressure drop dependence on particle shape, size distribution, packing arrangement and roughness

Packed beds have been used or proposed for many different applications, including thermal storage in buildings and in solar thermal power plants. In order to size the blowers and predict the operating and capital cost, the packed bed pressure drop must be known. The Ergun equation, commonly used for predicting packed bed pressure drop, over-predicts the pressure drop through randomly packed or structured beds of smooth spheres at Ergun Reynolds numbers in excess of ≈ 700, and previous work has found it to under-predict the pressure drop through beds of rock by a factor as high as 5. Present measurements of the pressure drop for air flow through beds of rough spheres, smooth cylinders, cubes and crushed rock are significantly higher than those for smooth spheres, and all differ from the Ergun equation. Particle shape, arrangement (including packing method) and surface roughness are shown to influence the pressure drop. Recent correlations for non-spherical particles are shown to differ significantly from present measurements. Different pressure drop measurements obtained for irregularly shaped rock packed into the test section in two different directions relative to the flow direction show that random packing is not necessarily isotropic. In order to predict the pressure drop over a packed bed of irregular particles such as crushed rock with any degree of accuracy, an empirical equation must be obtained from a sample of the particles for a given packing arrangement.