Chemie Ingenieur Technik, Vol.74, No.6, 745-745, 2002
Rigorous modeling of reactive absorption processes
Absorption of gases in liquid solutions accompanied by chemical reactions or reactive absorption, represents one of the most important industrial operations. The advantages of this process are enhanced solution capacity, low impurity concentrations up to the ppm-range, moderate operation pressure, and selective removal of contaminants. Reactive absorption is based on a combination of several kinetically controlled phenomena, the focus being on the coupling of chemical reactions and mass transfer in multicomponent mixtures. Therefore, a process description using the equilibrium concept is often insufficient and kinetic modeling is required. This paper describes the basics of rigorous modeling of reactive absorption processes. Several case studies are used in order to validate the models. In addition, a discussion of necessary model parameters, such as diffusion coefficients and reaction kinetics, is given. A reduced model with lower computation time is obtained via detailed sensitivity analysis. This model is successfully used in dynamic simulations. In this respect a proper consideration of the film reactions appears to be crucial.