Numerical Simulation of Heat and Mass Transfer Enhancement in Absorption Process With Double-Side Film-Inversion

Film-inversion is an effective way recently developed to enhance heat and mass transfer in absorbers. However, only one-side of round or rectangular tube i.e. half of the total heat transfer area is used to form film-inverting configuration in the published literature. The paper presents a double-side film-inverting scheme, which consists of two plate bundles and a set of comb shaped conjunction guiders between them for leading solution film from both-sides of each couple of the upper plate bundle to the opposite sides of the bottom ones. A two-scale crosswise corrugation plate bundle, which has vertical large corrugations and horizontal small ones, is suggested instead of the plane plate bundle. The horizontal small corrugation can make the film turbulent and film distribution uniform before and after inversion with surface tension effect, thus increasing the heat and mass transfer coefficients of the absorption process. A mathematic model for heat and mass transfer in absorption process with aqueous Li-Br solution falling film-inverting on two sequential vertical plane plates was established and solved numerically. The distributions of dimensionless velocity, temperature and concentration of liquid film profile before and after film-inverting were obtained. The influence of the number of inversion on heat and mass transfer characteristics was analyzed. The calculation results show that the heat and mass transfer coefficients of the once-film-inverting scheme have about 58% and 73% increment respectively over these of the none film-inverting scheme.