DESIGN OF A PACKED-BED ABSORPTION COLUMN CONSIDERING FOUR PACKING TYPES AND APPLYING MATLAB

In the present work, a packed bed absorption column is designed to recover certain amounts of ethanol contained in a gaseous stream. Four packing types (50-mm metal Hiflow® rings, 50-mm ceramic Pall® rings, 50-mm metal Top Pak® rings and 25-mm metal VSP® rings) are considered in order to select the most appropriate one in terms of column dimensions, pressure drop and mass-transfer results. Several design parameters were determined including column diameter (D), packing height (Z), overall mass-transfer coefficient (Km) and gas pressure drop (P/Z), as well as the overall number of gas-phase transfer units (NtOG), overall height of a gas-phase transfer unit (HtOG) and the effective surface area of packing (ah). The most adequate packing to use for this absorption system constitutes the 25-mm metal VSP® rings, since it provided the greatest values of Km (0.325 kmol/m3.s), and ah (169.57 m-1), as well as the lowest values of both Z (0.6 m) and HtOG (0.145 m), meaning that it will supply the higher mass-transfer conditions with the lowest column dimensions. The influence of both gas mixture (QG) and solvent (mL) feed flowrates on D, Z, Km, P/Z, NtOG and HtOG was also evaluated for the four packing considered. The design methodology was solved using computing software MATLAB® version 7.8.0.347 (R2009a) (Math Works, 2009), and also Microsoft Excel®.D