Review of Bubble Column Reactors with Vibration

Vibrating a bubble column reactor can increase the gas holdup (void fraction), as well the mass-transfer rate. Since the seminal work in the 1960s, there has been minimal effort focused on this topic until the early 2000s. Currently there are several groups studying this problem making advancements in our fundamental understanding of the process with detailed experiments, theoretical analyses, and physics-based models. However, throughout the literature, there are inconsistencies with both experimental results and proposed scaling of the fundamental properties, as well as minimal data spanning the parameter space. This review serves as an overview of key works from the 1960s and the 2000s, as well as to identify these inconsistencies between key studies. Recommendations for how to proceed with future work is provided with an emphasis on defining the parameter space in terms of the Reynolds number and the Froude number.