Scrubber Vessel Design

A vessel is a vessel is a vessel.

--Gertrude Stein

Gertrude , please elaborate?

It's a cultural thing.

What is special about scrubbers vis-a-vis other vessel types?

Perhaps you misunderstood the question.

the question is asking for reference materials that could be useful for effective design of gas scrubber vessels which might be out of the ordinary of normal vessel design ,not an opinion on their complexity, simplicity or difference to other vessels. Perhaps you can provide a normal answers not philosophical rhetoric questions which are contradictory to the question at hand

Never mind.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_scrubber

simonsd
Thanks for your details reply.I have designed a fair bit of surge vessels for irrigation some as big as 95m3I'm pretty content with mechanical design side of things but what confused me the most was the amount of chemical data for the gas, which I'm not sure what do with it. There's is also volumetric flow rate which I believe I have to use for sizing the vessel.
Scrubber will be installed upstream of the suction inlet of a gas turbine driven centrifugalcompressor unit. The scrubber has to be able remove entrained liquids, iron oxide particles, dust, or any other foreign matter that may be present in a gas stream.
Its a vertical cyclone type unit and I'm not sure the cyclone tube comes a compact unit already designed or I have to used the chemical data provided to do it?

You need a process engineer and/or a good book of the same order. Try LinkedIn.

Anon

Sorry I have been away and not able to respond

It looks as though you are changing discipline and moving from the mechanical design to the process (and then presumably mechanical) design of a vessel.

I would strongly point you in the direction of GPSA HAndbook which has all the sizing questions and answers that I think that you need.

A few things on which you will need to be clear.

Is the scrubber to be designed as one large cyclonic device? (A bit like a much larger Dyson)

Or will it have a 'tray' of small cyclonic units. Many of the big operting companies specify a complex array of devices that are fitted as a unit in the top of a scrubber that will include large numbers of small cyclonic units.

If you look at GPSA and the separation equations the key data will be

Density of liquid/solid and gas

Viscosity of liquid / gas

Mass flow

Actual volumetric flow

These separators essentially work on the difference in density of the liquid and gas so a wider density difference means a smaller vessel. Note that gas density is a function of molecular weight which is why this data is included.

The viscosity affects the settling time.

The ACTUAL volumetric flowrate is uesed to determine the velocity in the vessel (if the gas velocity exceeds the liquid settling velocity then the droplets will not separate). Volumetric flow is often quoted in normal and standard flows and you will need to convert to your operating conditions.

I have never had to deal with significant amounts of solids and I am not sure how differently you would handle them compared with liquids.

You will need to know a maximum particle size that can be allowed to pass to the compressor.

I have not actually designed a cylonic unit myself so I am not sure what other factors might be important.

Other things to consider will be nozzle sizings and what sort of fitting you have on the inlet. These are usually limited by the property rho. v2 (density times square of velocity) and there are different vlaues depending on the inlet device used. If you have a cyclonic device it may be that you don't need one.