Structured packings are widely used in many separation processes. In this paper, the liquid film flow behavior as well as mass transfer efficiency on the novel and the traditional structured packings is investigated after being simplified into multibaffled and inclined plate, respectively. The novel structured packing has a number of openings punched through the ridges on the inner and outer sides of the packing surface, and this structure corresponds to a certain flow pattern that influences mass transfer processes other than the traditional ones. The CFD method and VOF model are applied to investigate the vapor−liquid two-phase flow behavior and mass transfer process. Isopropanol desorption on the two kinds of plates is studied experimentally and numerically, and the experimental and simulation results are in good agreement. A significantly higher mass transfer efficiency of the multibaffled plate is observed, and the simulation results indicate successfully that the higher mass transfer efficiency on the novel structured packing results from the increased renewal rate and disturbance of liquid film flow.

A new computational mass transfer model is proposed for simulating the chemical absorption process with heat effect by solving the average fluctuating mass flux in turbulent mass conservation equation and the average fluctuating heat flux in turbulent heat conservation equation, so that the concentration profile and the temperature profile of column can be obtained. The feather of the proposed model is to abandon the conventional way of introducing the unknown turbulent mass transfer diffusivity Dtand the turbulent thermal diffusivity αtin the mass and heat conservation equations. By using the proposed model, the simulated results of CO2absorption by aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA) solution in an industrial scale column is presented, including MEA concentration, CO2loading and liquid phase temperature. The simulations are in agreement with the published experiment data.

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