Modelagem e simulação de adsorção em leito empacotado usando fluidodinâmica computacional.

Abstract

The use of adsorption to remove contaminants has been suggested as a prominent solution. Within the industrial context, packed bed adsorption is the one that attracts the most interest due to its continuous and easy operation process. Therefore, studies that study the behavior of the transport phenomena involved in adsorption are essential, mainly through modeling and simulation in order to develop more efficient processes. Within this context, computational fluid dynamics is an eminent option. Therefore, the main objective of the work is to model and simulate the adsorption in packed bed using computational fluid dynamics techniques through the software ANSYS ICEM and ANSYS CFX. The model developed was verified through experimental data obtained from the literature. In addition, the model was subjected to experimental conditions in a literature study whose adsorbent was activated carbon and the adsorbent (CO2) was a component of a binary gas mixture with an inert (He), being evaluated the effect of temperature and molar fraction. . Breaking curves with the expected shape were obtained, however, satisfactorily agreeing with the tested experiments. In the simulations, the RMS residue, root mean square, of 0.0001 was considered as a convergence criterion. The influence of important parameters for the process was studied, such as the initial concentration of the adsorbate and operating temperature, in addition to the influence of simplification considerations of the model. Thus, a 3 D transient model was obtained with this work, different from those commonly found in the literature with 1 or 2 D, which managed to describe the adsorptive process consistently with an emphasis on mass transport.