Effects of System Physical Properties on kG and

Effects of System Physical Properties on kG and kL When designing packed towers for nonreacting gas-absorption systems for which no experimental data are available, it is necessary to make corrections for differences in composition between the existing test data and the system in question. The ammonia-water test data (see Table 5-24-B) can be used to estimate HG, and the oxygen desorption data (see Table 5-24-A) can be used to estimate HL. The method for doing this is illustrated in Table 5-24-E. There is some conflict on whether the value of the exponent for the Schmidt number is 0.5 or 2/3 [Yadav and Sharma, Chem. Eng. Sci. 34, 1423 (1979)]. Despite this disagreement, this method is extremely useful, especially for absorption and stripping systems. 

It should be noted that the influence of substituting solvents of widely differing viscosities upon the interfacial area a can be very large. One therefore should be cautious about extrapolating kLa data to account for viscosity effects between different solvent systems. 

---