Study of process intensification Higee technology applied to the absorption

Abstract

Higee technology or High-gravity Technology has been widely studied for the intensification of industrial processes such as absorption, desorption, distillation, extraction, among others, in order to find and improve the benefits compared to conventional methods. According to Documents about Best Available Techniques (BREFs), Higee technology is emerging as an alternative to the methods used so far. This work studies Higee technology improvements applied to the absorption process compared to conventional packed columns. The absorption is mainly used to remove pollutant components of a gas stream to avoid leaks outside and/or to recover some component that the stream could contain for production purposes. To achieve the goals of this project, a bibliographic search of Higee technology, studied by different authors, has been performed. In this research, the focus is on the modifications made in recent years in order to show the advantages of this technology compared to the conventional one. After this research, the design of a conventional absorption column and Rotating Packed Bed have been studied in order to make a comparison among the design results and a comparison of these with those obtained experimentally by the different authors. From these studies the main conclusion is that the use of Higee technology get a huge reduction in the volume of the device and it is also possible to use smaller amounts of absorbent liquid. However, Higee technology presents some disadvantages over conventional technology because it is necessary that the absorbent liquid be subjected to a centrifugal force, so this will require greater energy. All these changes make the design more complex and the device suffers a faster wear due to continuous movement and, consequently, it increases the economic cost. Thus, based on studies performed so far, replacing the conventional absorption column for Higee technology is not recommendable. However, it should be further investigated because it has potential to get better results in comparison with conventional processes, either applied in the process studied in this work or applied to another types of processes.