Tower equipment is the most significant equipment in petrochemical industry. Full contact between gas-liquid or liquid-liquid are carried in tower to implement mass transfer. During production, the common tower equipments operate processes including rectificating, absorbing, desorbing, wetting and cooling of gas.
Packing absorption tower is a mass transfer apparatus with packing in the tower as gas-liquid contact member. Packing tower is a vertical cylinder filled with packing support plate in the bottom. The packing is placed on the packing support plate in random stacking or structure stacking.There is a packing platen to avoid the packing to be blew away by the upflow.
The gas gets into the tower through gas distribution unit and have a contra- flow with liquid going through the void of packing layer continually. The gas and liquid objects contact intimately and have mass transfer on packing surface.
Packing tower is the continuous contact gas-liquid mass transfer equipment.The two phrased composition change continually along the tower height. In normal operation conditions, the gas phrased is continual phrase, and liquid phrase is discrete phase.
The packing tower has its obvious advantage and disadvantage.
Advantage:
- Large production capacity
- High efficiency of separation
- Low pressure drop
- Small liquid holding capacity
- High operation flexibility
Disadvantage:
- High cost for packing
- The packing surface couldn’t be wet efficiently when the liquid load is too small. If so, it will reduce mass transfer efficiency.
- It couldn’t be used for materials with floating objects or easy polymerization.
- It is not suitable for side feed and discharge and other complex distillation.
Structure Diagram of Packing Tower
