Enhancing CO₂ Absorption with Compact Multiflow Absorber: Evaluation of Operational Factors

Abstract

Innovations in CO 2 absorption devices play a vital role in advancing industrial applications of CO 2 capture; increasing CO 2 absorption rate and decreasing the absorber are important tasks in amine-based CO 2 capture technologies. This study presents a novel absorber, a compact multiflow absorber, which employs cocurrent spray and traditional package. The integrated design of the spray and packed towers reduces the size of the absorber. By incorporating a cocurrent spray tower as the primary absorption unit, the absorber achieves higher CO 2 removal efficiency and significantly cut down the amount of package needed in the traditional absorber. A comparison with reported counter-current spray tower demonstrated higher overall absorption rate for proposed cocurrent spray tower. The cocurrent spray tower has an overall absorption rate approximately 50% higher than the counter-current spray tower in the first 60 s. The new absorber obtained an efficiency at 86%; however, the traditional package is only 67%. The newly designed absorber increased the CO 2 absorption efficiency by 28%. Finally, the relevance of each operational parameter was evaluated through orthogonal tests, while trend analysis elucidated the influence of various factors on the mass transfer evaluation indices.