STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF OPERATING PARAMETERS IN A FALLING FILM REACTOR FOR CO2 ABSORPTION USING DIETHANOLAMINE

Absorption of carbon dioxide (CO2) from flue gases is very important to various industries and chemical absorption by diethanolamine (DEA) can be used for this purpose. This work dealt with the effect of operating parameters on the CO2 output concentration and the absorption rate of CO2 in aqueous DEA solution. CO2 was absorbed in a falling film reactor at standard pressure and temperature. The reactor length and diameter were 1m and 0.0254m, respectively. The values of the CO2 output concentration vary between 23 to 7393 ppm and the absorption rate of CO2 in aqueous DEA varies between 2.68E-08 to 2.40E-07 kg/s. The results showed that the absorption rate of CO2 in the aqueous DEA solution increased with an increase in gas flowrate, the CO2 concentration in gaseous mixture and DEA percent. In addition, the results were statistically examined by Design-Expert software, using response surface experiment design and a historical method. Two mathematical relations were proposed to estimate the output concentration of CO2 and the absorption rate of CO2 in the aqueous DEA solution with good accuracy for falling film reactor (ReG. [1; 6] and ReL. [4; 40] at 298 K).