Wet flue gas desulfurization using micro vortex flow scrubber: Characteristics, modeling and simulation

Abstract

It has been a great concern that the process intensification and the system complexity for wet flue gas desulfurization (wet-FGD) with chemical absorption. To enhance the mass transfer performance of the De-SO2 process under the simple conditions, a micro-vortex-flow based scrubber was designed to investigate the characteristics of the wet-FGD with K2CO3 solution. The effects of the key operating parameters on De-SO2 performances were comprehensively examined, including absorbent concentration, inlet SO2 concentration, and liquid–gas flow rate. It was found that the De-SO2 efficiency increased generally with the increasing K2CO3 concentration, inlet SO2 concentration, and liquid flow rate but decreased with increasing gas flow rate. However, the overall gas-phase mass transfer coefficient increased as these parameters increase. Within the measured range, the overall gas-phase mass transfer coefficient varied from 2.88 × 10−3 to 1.13 × 10−2 kmol/m3·kPa·s, and the De-SO2 efficiency was observed in the range of 75.1% to 91.8%. On this basis, a semi-empirical correlation for predicting the vortex-flow-based De-SO2 mass transfer performance was developed with R2 = 0.958. Finally, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was employed to explore the relationship between the vortex flow and the principle of process intensification. The results may provide a positive reference for the industrial application of De-SO2 with the micro vortex flow scrubbing.