Flooding Calculations for Packed Column 1

[alamk]

I am trying to estimate the conditions for flooding in a packed absorber column

I am using empirical correlations to determine the gas rate at which flooding will occur for a given liquid flowrate.

See the link for a description of the equations I used:

http://users.rowan.edu/~savelski/uol/absorbtion.html

(It is equation 2)

I am wondering if this is the correct approach

Assume a ratio of L/G
Use assumed L/G ratio to calculate X=f(L/G)
Use X with equn 2 to calculate absolute value of G
Use assumed ratio and absolute value of G to calculate L

Then you have for a calculated liquid flowrate a corresponding gas flowrate at which flooding occurs.
For this liquid flowrate and for all gas flowrates below the calculated G, flooding will not occur.

Then the only trick is iterating enough times to get the actual absolute liquid flowrate that you are interested in

Is this the correct approach?

 

[katmar]

alamk,

Yes, you are approaching it correctly. If you are doing all the calculations by hand it is quite tedious, but it is very easy to do the iterations in a spreadsheet. In the old days we would have plotted a few points on a generalized flooding curve, and even that was reasonably quick.

A similar question came up in thread124-118011 recently and I gave a reference to a free downloadable spreadsheet there.