(590a) CFD Simulation of Liquid-Gas Flows On Structured Packing Elements for An Acid Gas Removal Column

Structured packing was expected to outperform random/unstructured packings and trays in capacity and/or separation efficiency for a gas/liquid contacting system due to its high surface area and low pressure drop. In this work, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is applied to study the characteristics of the gas-liquid flows over a structured packing. The interfacial area, liquid hold-up, and pressure drop is examined for the purpose of further investigation on an acid gas removal process in a floating liquid natural gas (FLNG) platform. An Euler-Euler approach combined with the volume-of-fluid (VOF) model is applied to simulate the liquid-gas multiphase flow using a CFD code, Fluent. The standard k-ε model, realizable k-ε, and the renormalization (RGN) k-ε models are compared in the case study. The effects of gas load (F factor) on the liquid film surface and thickness are also analyzed. The numerical results obtained from the simulations are validated with data available in the literature.