Geometry effect on membrane absorption for CO2 capture. Part I: A hybrid
modeling approach.
Abstract
Membrane absorption (MA) has a great prospect for CO2 capture. In MA
modeling, conventional 1D- and 2D- models make simplification of
membrane contactor (MC) geometry. Geometry simplification allows an easy
process modeling and numerical solution, however, is only reasonable for
particular MCs. Here, efforts are underway to quantify the geometry
effect on the MA-CO2 performance. First, we proposed a full 3D model
without geometry simplification for simulating the MA-CO2 process in
real MCs and then validated it with experimental data. More importantly,
we highlighted a preferable hybrid model in which a correction factor
(F) was introduced to the 2D simulation results to make their
combination approximately equal to the 3D simulation values. The F was
correlated with dimensionless parameters obtained from computational
fluid dynamics (CFD) studies for characterizing the geometry effect.
Such hybrid modeling contributes to characterizing the influence of
geometry on the MA-CO2 performance and improving computation
accuracy-efficiency combinations.