A novel potential application of SiC ceramic foam material to distillation: Structured corrugation foam packing

Applications using polymer-derived ceramic foam material as distillation packing or trays have demonstrated higher performance than classical mass transfer units, except for the operation range (Leveque et al., 2009; Gao et al., 2015). To overcome the disadvantages of classical units, many novel mass transfer units based on the polymer-derived ceramic foam material have been developed, such as Foam Monolithic Tray, Foam Ring Random Packing (FRRP), structured corrugation foam packing (SCFP) and so on. In this paper, the hydrodynamic performances and mass transfer efficiency of SCFP-SiC are examined in lab-scale equipment, with special emphasis on the effect of the foam cell size and sheet thickness. In general, based on the comparison with the traditional column packings, the experimental results indicate that the hydrodynamics and mass transfer performances of SCFP-SiC meet the requirements for the mass transfer elements with high theoretical stages and low pressure drop in the distillation column. Furthermore, a pilot-scale experiment of mass transfer efficiency for two air separation system (O-2/N-2, O-2/Ar) was performed to help understand the amplification effect of SCFP-SiC. The experimental results demonstrate that the SCFP-SiC has higher operation flexibility and significantly enhance the efficiency of vapor-liquid mass transfer at the large-scale for clear system. (C) 2019 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.