Mean drop behavior in the standard liquid–liquid extraction systems on an L-shaped pulsed sieve-plate column: experiment and modeling

In this study, the effect of operating parameters on drop behavior was investigated experimentally in an L-shaped pulsed sieve-plate column (LPSPC). LPSPC offers enhanced efficiency due to a high mixing rate provided by pneumatic or hydraulic pulsation of the liquids, which makes the dispersed phase drops coalesce and break. The response surface methodology (RSM) based on the central composite design (CCD) approach was applied for experimental modeling of three standard systems including toluene–water, butyl acetate–water, and butanol–water. Four parameters including pulsation intensity, interfacial tension, dispersion, and continuous phase velocities were examined in the experiments. Experimental results indicated that an increase in the pulsation intensity led to a decrease in Sauter mean diameter (SMD), and an increase in the flow rates of the phase cause an increase in SMD, although the effect of the flow rates on SMD was much lower than the pulsation intensity. Based on the obtained experimental data, new correlations have been proposed to predict SMD in two sections of the column tested by the goodness-of-fit statistics through analysis of variance. The coefficient of determination was achieved at 0.998 and 0.978 for horizontal and vertical sections, respectively, which demonstrated that the presented models estimated the experimental values very well. The optimum SMDs were obtained at 0.789 mm and 0.639 mm for the horizontal and vertical sections, respectively.