Establishment of reaction engineering approach for saline droplet and its application in spray evaporation simulation

The statistical study of droplets in spray evaporation tower has guiding significance for understanding spray evaporation and designing drying tower. The key to spray evaporation simulation is establishing a suitable single droplet evaporation model through experiment. In this paper, a visualized single droplet evaporation experiment platform was established. The mass, diameter, and temperature during the evaporation of 10 % NaCl solution droplets were obtained. The Reaction Engineering Approach model was developed and validated to describe the single droplet evolution process in saline water spray. A comparison calculation between the spray evaporation of pure and saline water was executed, and the distributions of residence time of droplets were obtained. It reveals that droplets with initial diameters less than 117 μm can fully evaporate, and for larger droplets, pure water droplets represent a higher evaporation ratio. About 50 % of the fully evaporated saline droplets stay in the backflow area. Contrast numerical experiments of saline water spray evaporation were performed, concluded that similar performance can be attained with the same gas-liquid ratio, and excessive inlet air will reduce the residence time of droplets. The influence of other operating parameters on the performance was also discussed, providing a comprehensive understanding of the regularity of spray drying.