The structural properties of fixed beds have been extensively reviewed by Haughey and Beveridge (1969). Two categories of fixed bed exist: regular and random packed. Regular packings provide complete control of bed voidage and surface area, but assembly is expensive. Regular packings are used, however, in thermal regenerators, checkerwork in high-temperature stoves in the glass and steel industries, and metallic matrix arrangements in the Ljungstrom rotary regenerators used in the power generation industry. In all these situations the pressure drop across the fixed bed must be small.

Random packings are found in a wide range of industrial operations: adsorption, catalysis, combustion, filtration, separation, and solid-fluid contacting in general. They are formed by the haphazard positioning of particles to provide a bed and the average bed properties are largely dependent on the mode of assembly (Debbas and Rumpf, 1966). The geometrical shape of fixed beds is normally cylindrical with the flow of the fluid parallel to the axis of the cylinder, however radial flow through annular beds is also used, when low pressure drop restrictions are specified. Only an infinitely sized bed is wholly random, but this is closely approached when the ratios of the container diameter (D) or diameters (D_i and D₀) and container length L to the particle diameter (d) are greater than 10 (Ridgway and Tarbuck, 1967). Random beds are simple in design, assembly is cheap, and construction is rugged.

Fixed beds are normally characterized by the specific surface area of the bed S_B and the mean fractional voidage of the bed, ε_m. The latter is defined as the free volume of the bed divided by the volume of the bed, that is,

\[\label{eq1} \varepsilon_{m}=\dfrac{bed\;volume - packing\;volume}{bed\;volume}\tag{1}\]

and the specific surface area of the bed is strictly dependent on the value of the mean bed voidage, ε_m. The specific surface area of the particles S is defined as the surface area of the particles divided by the volume of the particles. For a sphere,