Ceramic Hump Support

A ceramic hump support is a packing-support plate made of fired ceramic, shaped as a row of arched, perforated beams, the beam-type, gas-jet design used for high-capacity supports. It fills a specific niche. A stainless-steel support handles heat and load but can be corroded by an aggressive stream; a polypropylene support resists corrosion but softens once the gas is hot. Ceramic is the answer when the duty is both hot and corrosive, and especially when it is abrasive as well, because fired ceramic shrugs off strong acids and alkalis, tolerates high temperature, and resists wear, all at once. It is also stiff, so it carries heavy beds under high pressure without deforming. The trade is that ceramic is brittle and must be handled and supported with more care than metal. So the rule is simple: choose ceramic where the combination of corrosion, heat and abrasion would defeat both metal and plastic. Tell us the temperature and the chemistry and we will confirm whether ceramic is the right plate.

These two numbers describe how open the plate is, which is what keeps it from blocking. Ceramic porosity of about 50 percent refers to the ceramic body itself, roughly half of the material volume is pore space rather than solid, which lightens the plate and lets it breathe. The effective open area, near 100 percent, is the more important figure for flow: because the humps are a three-dimensional shape rather than a flat sheet with holes punched in it, the area available for gas and liquid to pass is spread over the whole raised surface, so in practice almost the entire footprint of the plate is open to flow. Two things follow. The pressure drop across the support is very low, and there is nowhere for solids or broken packing to bridge and build up, so the plate resists clogging by design. That matters most in dirty service and with small packing, where a flatter, less open support would gradually blind. Send us your packing and duty and we will match the plate.

It does the two jobs any packing support does, in the beam-type way. Structurally, it rests on a support ring and bears the weight of the packing and the liquid held in the bed. For the flow, its arched beams are perforated so that the rising vapour is injected through the holes in their sides while the liquid drains from the bed lower down, the two phases taking separate routes instead of competing through one set of openings. Because the humps lift most of the open area up off the floor, the plate passes a high gas and liquid load before it floods and adds little resistance. Give us the tower and the packing and we will size the support.

A ceramic hump support is used under the packing in towers whose service is corrosive, hot, or abrasive enough to rule out metal and plastic. It is found in oil refining and in chemical processing, in fertiliser production, in ethylene and oxygen manufacture, and in air-separation units, and its particular strength is large-diameter columns, being built for towers up to around 10 metres across, where it goes in as modular sections through the manholes and is assembled inside. In every case the plate holds the bed securely while giving the gas and liquid an open, non-clogging path, in a ceramic body that the process cannot corrode or overheat. Send us the column size, the packing and the operating conditions and we will design the support to suit.