Will laboratory and pilot plant columns soon become superfluous? – A concept for the determination of structured packing characteristics in a measuring cell under distillation conditions

A new approach to carry out separation performance tests for structured packings is introduced through a newly designed measuring cell. To characterize this new measuring cell, a suitable test system was identified and measurements regarding the separation performance as well as the dry and wet pressure drop were conducted. Furthermore, experiments were carried out with similar boundary conditions in columns of varying diameters (DN 50, DN 80, DN 250). The paper presents a comparison of the results gained to demonstrate the transferability and information value of the new measuring cell in comparison to conventional lab columns. To our knowledge, these are the first investigations evaluating the separation performance of distillation processes in small measuring cells of this kind. •Presentation of a new measurement cell design for separation efficiency measurements in structured packings.•Concept validation by comparison to data from laboratory and pilot plant scale measurements.•Reduce environmental footprint of separation processes by improved process design and scale up.