PREDICTION OF MASS TRANSFER COEFFICIENT OF THE CONTINUOUS PHASE IN A STRUCTURED PACKED EXTRACTION COLUMN IN THE PRESENCE OF SIO2 NANOPARTICLES

In this experimental study, mass transfer and hydrodynamic parameters of water/kerosene/acetic acid system in a packed column were investigated, in which the mass transfer direction was set from the continuous phase (saturated water of kerosene and acetic acid) to the dispersed phase (saturated kerosene of water) in all the experiments. To assess the impact of nanoparticles on mass transfer, the experiments were performed in the presence of SiO2 nanoparticles and absence of the nanoparticles. The results showed that the addition of the nanoparticles to the base fluid (saturated kerosene of water) increased the mass transfer efficiency to the critical concentration, 0.05 vol. %, due to the intensified internal circulation of the droplets. Beyond the critical concentration, the mass transfer efficiency declined by the occurrence of an agglomeration phenomenon, i.e., the change of the mass transfer mechanism from turbulence to diffusion due to the accumulation of the nanoparticles. An empirical correlation for the continuous phase Sherwood number was presented. The mean value of the absolute relative error was calculated to 8.04%, indicating that the proposed correlation represented the experimental data very well.