Analysis of Mass Transfer Performance in an Air Stripping Tower

Abstract

The carryover of working solution in a traditional stripping tower is of serious concern in real applications. A U-shaped spray tower to prevent carryover has been designed to study the stripping of water vapor from aqueous desiccant solutions of 91.8 to 95.8 wt% triethylene glycol. In this study, water vapor was removed from the diluted desiccant solution by heating the solution and stripping it with the ambient air. Therefore, the solution was concentrated to a desired concentration. This spray tower was capable of handling air flow rates from 3.2 to 5.13 kg/min and liquid flow rates from 1.6 to 2.76 kg/min. Since the literature data on air stripping towers are limited, studies on the mass transfer coefficient and other mass transfer parameters were carried out in this study. Under the operating conditions, the overall mass transfer coefficient calculated from the experimental data varied from 0.053 to 0.169 mol/m3·s. These corresponded to heights of a transfer unit of 2.3 to 0.71 m, respectively. The rates of stripping in this spray tower were typically varied from 2.28 to 12.15 kg H2O/h. A correlation of the mass transfer coefficient for the air stripping process was also developed in this study.