Even though the topic of rotating packed beds has been popular among researchers, as well as in chemical industry, for several decades, it is still a young and hardly optimized technology. Both the construction and the mode of operation of RPBs cause a lot of difficulties in measuring a variety of operational parameters, such as residence time or effective mass transfer area. Thus, researchers’ ability to create credible predictive models is very difficult, and sparse correlation functions are feasible for very few internal morphologies.

In traditional column processes, the efficiency of mass transfer is dictated mostly by the height of the internal (or number of mass transfer units), where the mass exchange takes place. Due to centrifugal force, in RPBs the mass transfer efficiency is analogously dependent on the radius of the rotor. Unfortunately, tension from centrifugal force also increases with the radius, which severely limits the feasible dimensions of an RPB internal. This implies that alternative paths for intensification need to be explored.

The vast majority of reported rotating packed bed processes use one of two well-researched types of internals: highly porous metal foam (monolithic internal) or wire mesh (coiled internal). Both solutions provide very high porosity while being cheap, but they are very suboptimal in terms of mass transfer, due to small interfacial areas and liquid residence times.