Numerical Study on Flow Field of a Diameter-varying Spray Tower for Amine-based CO₂ Absorption

Our group proposed a diameter-varying spray tower and a new spray mode of dual-nozzle opposed impinging spray to enhance the absorption performance of CO₂ spray absorption process and some interesting results have been obtained. However, the detailed information (flow field distribution) inside the tower is hard to be obtained by experimental work. In this work, to specifically explain the performance inside the proposed diameter-varying spray tower, ANSYS Fluent17.2 software was used to simulate gas-liquid two-phase flow inside the proposed diameter-varying spray tower. Two different spray methods are discussed in this work. One is the dual-nozzle opposed impinging spray method proposed by our research group, the other is mostly literature discussed spray in the middle method. The flow field of continuous gas phase and dispersed liquid phase has been carefully discussed to illustrate the better spray method, which do more good to the CO₂ absorption performance.