Digital manufacturing of variable lattice column internals

Internal lattices used to pack existing catalyst or adsorbent particles have demonstrated significant improvement of performance in reaction and separation processes. In this work, we developed a methodology to customize the column porosity as a function of the column length. The novel expanded structures contribute to control the amount of particles that can be packed in different locations of the lattice. The design of internal lattices and the evaluation of porosities by virtual packing were done digitally for spheres of 2.0 and 3.0 mm. The pressure drop of empty and packed structures was modelled using computational fluid dynamics and has been experimentally confirmed for the different structures used.