Numerical simulation of CO2 chemical absorption in a gas-liquid bubble column using the space-time CESE method

Abstract

Abstract In this study, numerical simulation of the removal process of CO2 using aqueous solutions of piperazine (PZ) in a bubble column has been done. The main focus of this work is to investigate the applicability of the space-time conservation element and solution element (CESE) method for the numerical solution of the coupling of hydrodynamics, mass transfer and chemical reactions. The reactive absorption process has been investigated by means of experiments and numerical simulation. A two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model in the Eulerian framework has been used to describe the gas-liquid system. To obtain the numerical solution, the CESE method based on a uniform rectangular mesh has been implemented by developing a computer code. Experimental study and CFD simulations have been carried out at different conditions of CO2 partial pressure (20 and 36 kPa) and solution concentration (0.1, 0.3 and 0.5 M). The simulation results were in reasonable agreement of 5.226 % and 4.575 % with the experimental values for gas holdup and mass transfer flux, respectively. The comparisons prove that the CESE method can be considered as a proper numerical method for the simulation of complex multiphase flows due to its simplicity, accuracy and low computational costs.