After the 1960s, structured packing came into being. Structured packing is a kind of packing that is arranged in a uniform geometric pattern in the tower and neatly stacked. It has been widely used because of its advantages such as large specific surface area, small pressure drop, uniform fluid distribution, and high mass transfer and heat transfer efficiency. The earliest developed was metal structured packing, followed by plastic structured packing, ceramic structured packing and carbon fiber structured packing. The structured packing has a regular, symmetrical and uniform geometry on the entire tower cross section. It stipulates the gas-liquid flow path, overcomes the channel flow and wall flow phenomena, and the pressure drop can be very small. Under the same flux and pressure drop, compared with random packing, a larger specific surface area can be arranged, so the efficiency is high. Due to the regularity of its structure, a reasonable design can achieve almost no amplification effect. At present, in large towers, the situation dominated by plate towers has been impacted by structured packing.

The earliest structured packing was Panapak, which was developed by Scofield for Pan American Oil in 1950. This packing is composed of rolled metal sheets with diamond-shaped openings. The sheets are made into corrugated shapes and combined into honeycomb packing. In the 1960s, Sulzer Brothers, Ltd. developed BX type packing, which is a metal wire mesh structured packing composed of corrugated wire mesh sheets arranged vertically.

In the 1970s, Sulzer Brothers developed Mellapak to reduce the cost of structured packing. It is a structured packing composed of thin metal corrugated sheets. Usually, the corrugations are at an angle of 45° to the axis, and the inclination angles of adjacent corrugated sheets are arranged in reverse, forming a honeycomb structure of cross-triangular channels. The metal surface is specially treated to improve the dispersion of the liquid. Subsequently, Koch Engineering Co., Glitsch, Inc. and Norton Co. in the United States, as well as Momz in Germany, all adopted similar metal sheet structured packing.