Performance of CO2 absorption in a diameter-varying spray tower

The application of spray towers for CO₂ capture is a development trend in recent years. However, most of the previous jobs were conducted in a cylindrical tower by using a single spray nozzle, whose configuration and performance is not good enough for industrial application. To solve this problem, the present work proposed a diameter-varying spray tower and a new spray mode of dual-nozzle opposed impinging spray to enhance the heat and mass transfer of CO₂ absorption process. Experiments were performed to investigate the mass transfer performance (in terms of the CO₂ removal rate (η) and the overall mass transfer coefficient (K_Ga_e2 are major factors, which affect the absorption performance and the maximums of η and K_Ga_e that are 94.0% and 0.574 kmol·m^-3·h^-1·kPa^-1, respectively, under the experimental conditions. Furthermore, new correlations to predict the mass transfer coefficient of the proposed spray tower are developed in various CO₂ concentrations with a Pearson Correlation Coefficient over 90%.