I've heard the terms tower and column used interchangeably through out my career. What, if any, difference would there be between a tower and a column?
I've seen these words indistinctly applied to mean vertical, cylindrical vessels used in chemical and petroleum processing, for example, to increase the degree of separation of mixtures by distillation or extraction, with mass and heat transfer processes, and sometimes chemical reactions, taking place.
However, it is not always so, for instance: cooling towers aren't usually cylindrical, and vacuum towers may have three different cylindrical sections.
Any comment ?
My impression has always been that British sources tend to use the "column" terminology (e.g. Chemical Engineering series by Coulson, Richardson and Sinnott) while the Americans use "tower" (e.g. Kern or Peters and Timmerhaus).
But this is not a hard and fast rule, and Perry seems to use column in preference to tower. I am in South Africa and both terms are used here, but in the industries where I have worked column has been the more common terminology.
I work primarily on the Gulf Coast, and while most of the interchangeable usage of the terms have been conversational, I have also seen both terms used formally within the same process unit, e.g., a fractionation column and a stripper tower. This lends credibility to the possibility that some actual difference in function, size, etc., may be being delineated. I'm hoping someone here can shed some light on it for me....
While it does not answer the specific question (above) it does provide some background to some vessel terminology along with the design guidlines relating to the location of nozzles, external piping, pipe supports, ladders and platforms.
