Design, conception, and assessment of an innovative liquid distributor for separation column

Abstract

Liquid distributor is an important internal in packed distillation columns. One of the key features of this equipment is the drip point density, which corresponds to the number of irrigation points per area of the cross-section. For gravity liquid distributors, increasing the number of irrigation holes generally requires small hole diameters, which makes the equipment more sensitive to plugging. In this work, we disclose a new gravity liquid distributor that achieves large drip point densities without requiring smaller irrigation holes. This distributor is an adaptation of the classic orifice-pan type, in which we add a tree-like structure made of wires to spread the liquid dripping from the orifices. The liquid flows outside the wires and splits several times over the different branching levels before falling on the packed bed. From an orifice-pan configuration with drip point density of 736 pts/m2, we designed and constructed enhanced distributors with a theoretical irrigation density of 14,800 pts/m2. Performance comparison using a recently disclosed structured packing shows that these enhanced distributors can decrease HETP from 0.45 m to 0.27 m.