A distillation tray with high efficiency and excellent operating flexibility for viscous mixture separation

Abstract

Article Highlights• A tray was designed to overcome the drawback of low operating flexibility of flowguided sieve tray • Hydrodynamic and mass transfer performance of the tray was tested • It has higher efficiency and operating flexibility, lower pressure drop than flow-guided sieve tray • Its applications to separate the mixture of high viscosity proved the tray's excellent performance Abstract A flow-guided sieve-valve tray (FGS-VT) with high efficiency was designed to overcome the shortcoming of low operating flexibility of the flow-guided sieve tray. Its dimensions and geometry, as well as structure characteristics, are presented. The hydrodynamics and mass transfer performance, including dry--plate pressure drop, wet plate-pressure drop, weeping, entrainment and tray efficiency, of two types of FGS-VTs (FGS-VTs with 14 and 8 valves, respectively) and one flow-guided sieve tray were tested in an air-water-oxygen cold model experiment with a 0.6 m diameter plexiglass column. The results demonstrate that FGS-VT with 14 valves works better than FGS-VT with 8 valves, and in comparison with the flow-guided sieve tray, the flow-guided sieve--valve tray with 14 valves has higher tray efficiency, bigger operating flexibility, and lower wet-plate pressure drop (when all the valves are opened fully). Additionally, two typical applications to separate the mixture with high viscosity, solid, powder, easy-to-foam or easy self-polymerization components proved the unique advantages of FGS-VT.