Mass Transfer Performance and Empirical Correlations of CO2 Absorption from CO2-Rich Gas Stream in a Random Packed Column

Abstract

CO2 chemical absorption from the gas streams featured with high CO2 concentration into diethanolamine (DEA), potassium glycinate (PG) and potassium L-argininate (PA) was investigated in a random packed column. Effects of main operation parameters including absorbent concentration, solvent flow rate, solvent temperature, the initial CO2 loading, gas flow rate and CO2 partial pressure on CO2 mass transfer performance were experimented according to the overall volumetric gas phase mass transfer coefficient (KGae) . Based on the experimental data, the empirical correlations for easily predicting the KGae value were proposed for all the three solvents, and most of the calculated KGae values are in agreement with the experimental KGae values with an average absolute deviation less than 8%. PA can obtain the highest KGae value than PG and DEA. According to the empirical correlations of KGae, the most significant influence factor to KGae is the solvent temperature for PG, the solvent flow rate for PA and the active absorbent concentration for DEA, respectively.