(174a) “Liquid Entrainment in Kettle Reboiler with Asymmetrically Located Nozzles”

Entrainment is the carryover of the liquid droplets in vapor streams from kettle reboiler and can cause low efficiency in the distillation column. In the other applications for kettle type exchanger as a vaporizer , even a small amount of entrainment entering the rotating equipment such as centrifugal compressors and pumps will increase power requirements and damage rotating elements. These type of issues during plant operation can be avoided with the proper thermal design of kettle reboiler to reduce entrainment ratio for the stream leaving exchanger.

Sufficient disengagement space should be provided in a kettle reboiler to minimize entrainment of liquid and increase efficiency of the equipment. The amount of entrainment depends on:

• Kettle size
• Number of nozzles
• Vapor generation in the bundle
• Vapor space above the bundle
• Use of demisters

HTRI is the common software for thermal design of kettle reboilers to predict entrainment ratio considering different parameters.

Presentation will focus on Liquid Entrainment in Kettle Reboiler with asymmetrically located nozzles to show how entrainment ratio will increase when nozzles are located asymmetrically.