Supplement to the paper “Packed Bed Photocatalytic Reactors . A Packing Structure Model and its Experimental Validation with Computerized Tomography

Abstract

The radiation field in photocatalytic packed beds results from direct energy exchange between the lamp and the catalytic beads, and from mutual exchange between beads that are close to each other. The statistical description of these exchange mechanisms requires of the knowledge of the one-particle and two-particle distribution functions. The detailed physical and mathematical basis of a statistical model of the structure of a bed of spherical-like particles of non-negligible diameter, are presented in this supplement. The proposed model has been cast in terms of one and two-particle distribution functions, based on a widely accepted physical picture of the packing structure. The model reproduces the expected bed structure surrounding arbitrarily chosen particles at different distances from the annulus walls. Elsewhere [9], this theoretical model has been validated against results obtained with tomography experiments.