Direct numerical simulation of reactive absorption in gas-liquid flow on structured packing using interface capturing method

Direct numerical simulations are performed in order to study physical and reactive absorption in gas-liquid flow on structured packing. The volume of fluid method is used to capture the gas-liquid interface motion. The mass transport is computed by additional chemical species concentration transport equation with adequate modelling of solubility and chemical reaction. The numerical difficulties arise in imposing jump discontinuity for chemical concentrations at the interface due to different solubility. These difficulties are solved by an original method using a continuum mechanical modelling of two phases flow and Henry's law with constant coefficient. The present study shows how the mass transfer is affected by the complex geometry considered here and by the flow conditions. The results show firstly that the liquid side mass transfer is well predicted by the Higbie theory and the exposure time of a typical element of volume near the interface corresponds to ratio between characteristic length and velocity of the interface provided that the real velocity of the interface is used. For the considered geometry, the transfer is found to be increased compared to the transfer of a plane liquid film. Finally, for the case where the mass transfer is accompanied by second order irreversible chemical reaction in the liquid phase, the numerical results are compared to approximate solution presented by Brian et al. [1961. Penetration theory for gas absorption accompanied by a second order chemical reaction. A.I.Ch.E. J. 7, 226-231] and good agreement is observed. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.