A Novel Potential Application of SiC Ceramic Foam Material to Distillation: Structured Corrugation Foam Packing

• Main Authors: Hong Li, Ying Meng, Jing Zeng, Xingang Li, Xin Gao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. 2018-10-01
• Series: Chemical Engineering Transactions
• Online Access: https://www.cetjournal.it/index.php/cet/article/view/9250

Applications using polymer-derived ceramic foam material as distillation packing or trays have demonstrated higher performance than classical mass transfer units, except for the operation range [Leveque et al., 2009; Gao et al., 2015]. To overcome this disadvantage, a series of novel mass transfer units based on the polymer-derived ceramic foam material have been developed, such as Foam Monolithic Tray, Structured Corrugation Foam Packing (SCFP) and so on. In this paper, the hydrodynamic performances and mass transfer efficiency of a SCFP-SiC is examined, with special emphasis on the effect of the foam cell size and sheet thickness. The hydraulic performance parameters and the mass transfer efficiency of SCFP are measured as 100 mm i.d. diameter. The experimental values are compared with the traditional column packings. In general, the comparison results indicate that the hydrodynamics and mass transfer performances of SCFP meet the requirements for the mass transfer elements in the distillation column. Besides, this paper also made the measurement of the SCFP-SiC in the air separation systems. The experiments indicated that SCFP has the high theoretical stages and the low pressure drop for the air separation system. The results also indicate that the SCFP has higher operation flexibility and significantly enhance the efficiency of vapor-liquid mass transfer at the industrial scale for clean system.