Fundamental investigations on mass transfer and mixing in mulitphase flow through a solid sponge are planned. The aim is to judge the potential application as packing in thermal process engineering.

Solid sponges have a high potential for application as randomly structured and bi-continuous packing in thermal process engineering. They combine the favourite properties of structured packings with them of packed beds and showed a relatively low pressure drop in orientating experiments. Thus they could be used as static mixer and for surface renewal. The behaviour of solid ceramic sponges in multiphase flow has not yet been investigated, although first experimental results for metal sponges exist in literature. The aim of this project is to investigate the fundamentals of mixing and mass transfer between the two fluids in multiphase flow through solid sponges and to compare them with conventional column packings.

Experiments in gas-liquid and liquid-liquid counter-current and co-current flow are planned as well as modelling in analogy to existing models for structured packings or packed beds. The typical parameters to be determined are pressure drop, residence time distributions, dispersion coefficients, static and dynamic hold-up as well as interfacial area and mass transfer coefficients. Several experimental setups are necessary to realise the measurements with methods already established in literature.
Several sponge parameters are varied during the studies, such as the material, the porosity and the number of pores per inch. A detailed analysis of the geometrical sponge parameters is planned with means of light microscopy and Magnetic Resonance Imaging in order to obtain e.g. the specific surface area as a characteristic length for correlations.