Process intensification in artificial gravity

Powerful superconducting magnets constitute adequate proxies for generating artificial gravity environments in earthbound experimentations. The application of microgravity or macrogravity conditions could be interesting for the pharmaceutical and medical domains for discovering and identifying new drugs and their actions. In the chemical engineering area, strong inhomogeneous magnetic fields could potentially open attractive applications. For example, in multiphase catalytic systems, several factors must be optimized for improving process efficiency. Preliminary experimentations and model calculations reveal that inhomogeneous and strong magnetic fields, applied to such systems as mini trickle-bed reactors, are capable of affecting reactor hydrodynamics, which can be taken advantage of for improving process performance. Pressure drops, liquid holdups, and wetting efficiency experimental data have been obtained for two-phase downward gas-liquid trickle beds in the presence of inhomogeneous magnetic fields. Magnetic field effects on trickle bed hydrodynamic properties have been explained using the gravitational amplification factor that commutes the Kelvin body force density into an artificial gravitational body force.