New HIGEE-Rotating Zigzag Bed and Its Mass Transfer Performance

Abstract

To overcome the disadvantages of the rotating bed available in open literature, a novel kind of high gravity device-rotating zigzag bed (RZB) was developed, which exhibits many superior features owing to its unique rotor combining a rotational part with a stationary one. The outstanding characteristics of RZB are its capability of middle-feed and easily realizing multirotor configuration in one unit by simply installing multiple rotors along the same axis. Thus one unit of RZB can be applied to continuous distillation processes with a higher mass transfer capacity. A preliminary test of mass transfer performance of the RZB in a pilot-scale system using methanol-water was carried out in this study. Experimental results show its excellent mass transfer behavior with an acceptable pressure drop. Comparison with rotating packing bed (RPB) shows that RZB provides equivalent mass transfer efficiency to RPB but exhibits excellent operability with a higher turndown ratio than that of RPB. Comparison with valve tray indicates that the baffle efficiency of RZB is slightly lower than the plate efficiency of valve tray. But if the difference between the tray space and baffle space is taken into consideration, RZB provides much higher efficiency than that of valve tray. Therefore the RZB is a kind of high efficiency gas-liquid contactor and a promising alternative in chemical process industries.

Carbon dioxide absorption in a cross-flow rotating packed bed

“…The original RPB could be operated at the mode of gas-liquid countercurrentflow. The countercurrent-flow RPB has been proved to enhance gas-liquid mass transfer in diverse processes such as distillation (Kelleher and Fair, 1996;Lin et al, 2002;Wang et al, 2008), absorption (Munjal et al, 1989;Kumar and Rao, 1990;Chen and Liu, 2002;Lin et al, , 2004Lin et al, , 2009aLin et al, ,b, 2010Tan and Chen, 2006;Cheng and Tan, 2006;Lin and Jian, 2007;Jassim et al, 2007;Lin and Chien, 2008;Lin and Su, 2008;Cheng et al, 2010), stripping (Keyvani and Gardner, 1989;Singh et al, 1992;Liu et al, 1996;Y.S. Chen et al, 2005a,b;Liu, 2006, 2007), reactive precipitation (Chen et al, 2000(Chen et al, , 2003Wang et al, 2004) and ozone oxidation Y.H.…”

Removal of methanol and 1-butanol from binary mixtures by absorption in rotating packed beds with blade packings

“…Hence, the RPB increased the area of contact between gas and liquid and reduced the total resistance to mass transfer, considerably reducing the size of the equipment and the capital and operating costs [10]. The RPB has been extensively utilized for distillation [11][12][13], VOCs absorption [14][15][16][17][18][19][20], CO 2 absorption [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], O 3 absorption [30][31][32], ozonation [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], reactive precipitation [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52], and stripping [53,54].…”

Evaluation of alkanolamine solutions for carbon dioxide removal in cross-flow rotating packed beds

“…Therefore, the gas-liquid mass transfer would frequently be enhanced by a factor of 10-100 and the dramatic reduction in the equipment volume would be achieved, thereby reducing the capital and operating costs [5]. A variety of studies have appeared in which the attention was focused on the applications of the countercurrent-flow RPB in diverse processes such as distillation [6][7][8][9][10][11], absorption [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], stripping [26][27][28][29][30], deaeration [31][32][33][34][35], reactive precipitation [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47], and ozone oxidation [48][49][50][51]…”