1 reply to this topic

[BFly]

Dear all,

 

I am designing a simple scrubber to scrub an organic component from air to below 10 mg/Nm3 to allow emission to atmosphere. Scrubbing is done in a packed column using a large excess of water at atmospheric conditions.  The organic component is soluble in water (~1-2%). Water consumption is not really an issue since we can reuse it. 

 

We have the vapour-liquid equilibria by means of Henry coefficients for this highly non-ideal system and we trust those data. 

 

We don't have a lot of experience with scrubbers for scrubbing to low concentration. We are more used to designing distillation systems. And therefore we are approaching the design of the scrubber system in the same way: based on the physical properties we calculate the number of theoretical stages, multiply that with the height of a theoretical plate (HETP, typical from vendor using substantial overdesign), etc.

 

My question now is: is this approach still reliable when scrubbing to very low concentrations in the vapour phase? Or will the HETP be possibly very much larger (> 2 times) due to mass transfer limitations in the vapour phase for instance and is another approach required. Or is experimental verification in a column setup required?

 

Best regards,

 

Bernard

[breizh]

Bernard,

Probably good to read .

Hope this helps

 

Breizh

Edited by breizh, 27 September 2013 - 07:04 AM.