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Brief introduction of rotating packed bed

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20859-x

“Such a solution is the RPB (rotating packed bed) technology, in which the mass exchange process takes place under high gravity conditions (Ramshaw and Mallinson 1981). This equipment allows for the intensification of multiphase contacting, large throughput, and short residence (Kelleher and Fair 1996; Agarwal et al. 2010). Furthermore, better turbulent conditions lead to a higher mass transfer coefficient which allows the minimisation of the size of RBP units in comparison to traditional columns (Rao et al. 2004). Thanks to its unique design, RBP was determined to have significant advantages over traditional packed columns, and it can also be used for some processes that are nearly impossible to conduct in conventional reactors. This technology has been known for 30 years, but there are still some aspects of it that require further investigation. One of the most important is the understanding of fluid dynamics inside the rotor. This is much more complicated than in standard packed columns because of the annular shape of the rotor and because the flow regime changes with radial distance from the centre. Even if some mathematical models of the RPB unit hydrodynamics are already created, the majority is dedicated to specific unit sizes and shapes.

Nowadays, a lot of research has been carried out on RPBs in the following fields: (i) flow hydrodynamics (Zhang et al. 2020; Gładyszewski et al. 2021); (ii) mass transfer (Wang et al. 2019); (iii) liquid holdup (Zhou et al. 2010; Xie et al. 2017); (iv) micromixing (Wenzel and Górak 2018; Ouyang et al. 2019), (v) distillation (Agarwal et al. 2010; Mondal et al. 2012; Qammar et al. 2019); and (v) absorption (Wojtasik et al. 2019; Liu et al. 2021). Currently, RPBs have already been widely applied in many chemical processes, e.g. distillation, absorption, deaeration of liquids, production of hydrochlorous acid, solvent recovery, methylene diphenyl diisocyanate production, isobutylene isoprene rubber production, biodiesel production, removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from waste gas streams and selective H2S removal (Neumann et al. 2018). The RPB is also a promising technology for CO2 capture in the post combustion of a power plant because of the possible reduction of installation size and energy demand and its highly efficient operation (Cheng et al. 2010; Chamchan et al. 2017).

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