We use an analogy to porous media to derive a correlation for the friction factor in CICC s We start with a review of selected literature work on this topic We then recall the principles of the porous medium analogy and present the main body of our work on the analysis of pressure drop data We finally conclude with the proposed correlation The main novelty of our work is to propose predictive correlations for the permeability and drag factor that include the dependency on void fraction of the CICC s (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved