Investigation on a vertical radial flow adsorber designed by a novel parallel connection method

Due to the increasing global demand for industrial gas, the development of large-scale cryogenic air separation systems has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Increasing the height of the adsorption bed in a vertical radial flow adsorber used in cryogenic air separation systems may efficiently increase the treatment capacity of the air in the adsorber. However, uniformity of the flow distribution of the air inside the adsorber would be deteriorated using the height-increasing method. In order to reduce the non-uniformity of the flow distribution caused by the excessive height of adsorption bed in a vertical radial flow adsorber, a novel parallel connection method is proposed in the present work. The experimental apparatus is designed and constructed; the Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) technique is used to develop a CFD-based model, which is used to analyze the flow distribution, the static pressure drop and the radial velocity in the newly designed adsorber. In addition, the geometric parameters of annular flow channels and the adsorption bed thickness of the upper unit in the parallelconnected vertical radial flow adsorber are optimized, so that the upper and lower adsorption units could be penetrated by air simultaneously. Comparisons are made between the height-increasing method and the parallel connection method with the same adsorber height. It is shown that using the parallel connection method could reduce the difference between the maximum and minimum radial static pressure drop by 86.2% and improve the uniformity by 80% compared with those of using the height-increasing method. The optimal thickness ratio of the upper and lower adsorption units is obtained as 0.966, in which case the upper and lower adsorption units could be penetrated by air simultaneously, so that the adsorbents in adsorption space could be used more efficiently.

Numerical Investigation into the Distributor Design in Radial Flow Adsorber

Air flow distribution in radial flow adsorber was numerically investigated using computational fluid dynamics(CFD)method,which was proved to be applicable to study the problem of non-uniform distribution in radial flow adsorber.Results showed that the degree of non-uniformity was more serious in desorption process than that is adsorption process.Therefore,it was considered that the non-uniform distribution of flow in a radial flow adsorber was mainly manifested in the desorption process.Optimum design of distributor parameters can improve the flow distribution in adsorber.Meanwhile,three different structures of distributor and the effect of breathing valve were analyzed.Results revealed that truncated cone is more effective than tubular and conical distributors in flow distribution.By inserting the truncated cone in central channel,desorption uniformity was increased by 6.56%and the breakthrough time of CO_(2)was extended from 564s to 1138s in the adsorption process.The“dead zone”problem at the top of adsorber during the desorption process was solved by opening breathing valve,which prolonged the working life of adsorber and was proved to have less effect on the uniform of airflow.