Packed bed adsorbers

Adsorption processes make use of the fact that the adsorbent s loadability depends on pressure and temperature. The process is conducted such that the gas mixture to be separated is fed through an adsorbent packed bed whereby easily adsorbable gas components accumulate on the surface and those components that are harder or impossible to adsorb pass through the packed bed. 

Variations of Adsorption, Design of Adsorbers 305 Table 4-10. Mass and heat transfer in an adsorbent packed bed. 

Adsorbent particle radius and diameter Adsorbent packed bed void fraction Effective pore diffusion coefficient Superficial gas velocity... 

Table 8 I ElTective Thermal Conductivities of Adsorbent Packed Beds...

In order to achieve bulk gas separation by adsorption, the adsorbent must be used repeatedly. The desorption step takes a rather long time if thermal desorption is employed because of a relatively large time constant of heat transfer due to poor thermal conduction in the adsorbent packed bed. 

Solid Desiccants. The sohd desiccants used in dynamic appHcations fad into a class caded adsorbents (see Adsorption). Because they are used in large packed beds through which the gas or Hquid to be treated is passed, the adsorbents are formed into soHd shapes that adow them to withstand the static (fluid plus sohd head) and dynamic (pressure drop) forces imposed on them. The most common shapes are granules, extmded pedets, and beads. 

Mass Transfer and Useful Capacity. The term useful capacity, also referred to earlier as breakthrough capacity, differs from the equihbrium capacity shown on Figures 9a and 9b. The useful capacity is a measure of the total moisture taken up by a packed bed of adsorbent at the point where moisture begins to appear in the effluent. Thus the drying process cycle must be stopped before the adsorbent is fully saturated. The portion of the bed that is not saturated to an equihbrium level is called the mass-transfer 2one. 

Fig. 14. Position of water front in packed bed of adsorbent during dynamic dehydration. Conditions 50% rh 10.2 cm/s air particle size = caO.167 cm ...

From surface area to volume ratio considerations, the internal area is practically all in the small pores. One gram of the adsorbent occupies 2 cm as packed and has 0.4 cnP in small pores, which gives a surface area of 1150 m /g( or about 1 mi per 5 lb or 6.3 miVft of packing). Based on the area of the annular region filled with adsorbate, the solute occupies 22.5 percent of the internal pore volume and 13.5 percent of the total packed-bed volume. 

Intraparticle convection can also occur in packed beds when the adsorbent particles have very large and well-connected pores. Although, in general, bulk flow through the pores of the adsorbent particles is only a small frac tion of the total flow, intraparticle convection can affec t the transport of veiy slowly diffusing species such as macromolecules. The driving force for convec tion, in this case, is the... 

FIG. 16-9 General scheme of adsorbent particles in a packed bed showing the locations of mass transfer and dispersive mechanisms. Numerals correspond to mimhered paragraphs in the text 1, pore diffusion 2, solid diffusion 3, reaction kinetics at phase boundary 4, external mass transfer 5, fluid mixing. 

Rate equations are used to describe interphase mass transfer in batch systems, packed beds, and other contacting devices for sorptive processes and are formulated in terms of fundamental transport properties of adsorbent and adsorbate. 

For most large-scale processes, adsorbent particle size varies from 0.06 to 6 mm (0.0025 to 0.25 in), but the adsorbent packed in a fixed bed will have a fairly narrow particle size range. Pressure drop in adsorbers can be changed by changing the diameter to bed depth ratio and by changing the particle size (see Sec. 5). Adsorbent size also determines separation performance of adsorbent columns—increasing efficiency with decreasing particle size. In hquid-phase process-... 

Gaseous and particulate pollutants are withdrawn isoldnetically from an emission source and collected in a multicomponent sampling train. Principal components of the train include a high-efficiency glass- or quartz-fiber filter and a packed bed of porous polymeric adsorbent resin (typically XAD-2 or polyurethane foam for PCBs). The filter is used to collect organic-laden particulate materials and the porous polymeric resin to adsorb semivolatile organic species (com-... 

Fluidised beds have been used previously for the industrial-scale recovery of the antibiotics streptomycin and novobiocin.30 However, more recently, considerable interest has been shown in the use of fluidised beds for the direct extraction of proteins from whole fermentation broths.31 In a packed bed, the adsorbent particles are packed within the contactor. The voidage, that is, the inter-particle space, is minimal and thus feedstock clarification is mandatory to avoid clogging of the bed. In a fluidised/expanded bed, the adsorbent bed is allowed to expand by irrigation with feedstock. Bed voidage is increased, allowing the passage of particulates in the feed. The diameters of the adsorbent beads are exaggerated for illustrative clarity. 

The global design equations for packed beds—e.g.. Equations (10.1), (10.9), (10.39), and (10.40)—all have a similar limitation to that of the axial dispersion model treated in Chapter 9. They all assume steady-state operation. Adding an accumulation term, da/dt accounts for the change in the gas-phase inventory of component A but not for the surface inventory of A in the adsorbed form. The adsorbed inventory can be a large multiple of the gas-phase inventory. 

Compact heat exchangers MicroChannel heat exchangers Rotor/stator mixers Rotating packed-bed Centrifugal adsorber... 

In this study, Pt/AliOj having high activity for CO oxidation and different affinities for fee adsorption of CO and Hi was selected as a catalyst/adsorbent In a conventional packed bed reactor (PBR), fee surface of fee catalyst is dominantly covered by COads with small amotmt of Oads fee CO conversion is therefore low. Several investigations on periodic operation have illustrated feat fee reaction front wife comparable amount of fee two adsorbed species leads to enhancement of fee CO conversion. Conceptually, this type of the reaction front should be generated by application of a CMBR, as well. Figure 1 illustrates an image of... 

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