Solutions to foam entrainment in the C5 distillation column
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Our company has a distillation tower whose trays are of the tongue-shaped type. It is used for separating C5, which contains mesitylene and isoprene; it has relatively high activity. A large amount of polymer is generated in the preceding reactor, and when this polymer enters the tower, it can clog the tray sheets. Due to the gas outlet at the side of this tower, mist entrainment often occurs. In severe cases, it can lead to flooding. The tower was shut down for a month some time ago; after it was restarted, the operating capacity was increased gradually. Once the feed rate reached 6.5 tons, foaming occurred again. It was not possible to stop it for maintenance, so I had to ask the operators to reduce the reflux level in order to restore normal operation temporarily. Our target is 8.5 tons. I’m struggling to figure out how to carry out some process adjustments on the tower without stopping it, in order to increase the feed rate while still ensuring that the product meets quality standards.
None of the students can come up with an idea
The gas outlet of a distillation tower usually requires the installation of mist and foam removal separator internals. Traditional mist and foam eliminators generally use a simple wire mesh design. However, screen foam removal efficiency is low, and the fluid has little elasticity under overload conditions; an overload of 10% usually results in significant \"liquid flooding,\" leading to almost complete loss of separation efficiency. In recent years, most new projects have adopted dynamically efficient vane-type or multi-factor swirl parent-child designs, and existing projects have also begun to undergo technical upgrades. It should be noted that both dynamic vane-type and swirl-type mist and foam separators belong to dynamic separation technologies, making the reliability and accuracy of the design and calculation platform crucial. Otherwise, the results will not be ideal. Please visit www.novelenergytech.com to learn more about it.