The effective heat transfer parameters in a trickle bed reactor (gas-liquid co-current downflow through packed bed reactors), ker, the effective radial thermal conductivity of the bed, and hw, the effective wall-to-bed heat transfer coefficient are estimated for air-water system over a wide range of flow rates of air (0.01-0.898 kg/ms) and water (3.16-71.05 kg/ms) covering trickle, pulse, and dispersed bubble flow regimes in a 50 mm I.D. column employing ceramic spheres (2 mm), glass spheres (4.05 and 6.75 mm) and ceramic raschig rings (4 and 6.75 mm) as the packing materials. Radial temperature profile method is used for the estimation of ker and hw using the experimentally measured radial temperature profile in conjunction with the solution of the two-dimensional pseudo-homogeneous two-parameter model. Radial Basis Functional Networks (RBFN) of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are also applied for modeling the effective heat transfer parameters in the trickle bed reactor. The RBFN designed to suit the present system has 7 inputs (four temperatures at four radial positions in the bed, liquid and gas rates, and the ratio of column to particle diameter) and 3 outputs (ker, hw, and the flow regime). The network predictions are found to be in a very good agreement with the experimentally observed values of ker, hw, and the flow regime
[1]
B. Babu,et al.
Estimation of heat transfer parameters in a trickle-bed reactor using differential evolution and orthogonal collocation
,
1999
.
[2]
Gabriel Wild,et al.
Heat transfer in a packed bed reactor with cocurrent downflow of a gas and a liquid
,
1996
.
[3]
Santanu Chaudhury,et al.
Inversion of RBF networks and applications to adaptive control of nonlinear systems
,
1995
.
[4]
Mahesan Niranjan,et al.
Neural networks and radial basis functions in classifying static speech patterns
,
1990
.
[5]
J. Nadal,et al.
Learning in feedforward layered networks: the tiling algorithm
,
1989
.
[6]
V. G. Rao,et al.
SOLID-LIQUID MASS-TRANSFER IN PACKED-BEDS WITH COCURRENT GAS-LIQUID DOWNFLOW
,
1985
.
[7]
Pierre Baldi,et al.
Neural Networks: Applications
,
2001
.
[8]
Hugo I. Lasa,et al.
Chemical Reactor Design and Technology
,
1986
.
[9]
Yatish T. Shah,et al.
Gas-liquid-solid reactor design
,
1979
.
[10]
T. Edgar,et al.
Estimation of heat transfer parameters in a packed bed
,
1976
.