CFD Modelling of CO2 Absorption in an Aqueous Medium in a Spray Column Scrubber with an Innovative Helical Sparger

Future decarbonisation scenarios will make carbon capture and storage (CCS) a viable solution for organisations that use a lot of energy. Nevertheless, due to current technology's high energy and financial costs, CCS systems are challenging to deploy, making researchers prioritise novel solutions based upon new/improved methods such as chemical absorption, adsorption and solutions like solvents, sorbents, membranes, and new process designs. Mitigating CO2 using water is a potential and cost-effective method; hence, this paper presents a simulation analysis of CO2 absorption technology in a spray column scrubber with a novel helical sparger (NHS). In this context, a model was developed using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique where a spray column scrubber with two different spargers (a conventional sparger and a novel helical sparger (NHS)) was designed to absorb CO2. The turbulent kinetic energy, the volume fraction of CO2, and hydrodynamics for both the spargers were determined. The results showed significant improvement in CO2 absorption in the novel helical scrubber as it shows a CO2 absorption efficiency of 52.64% while the conventional sparger shows it of 29.34% during experiments in aqueous medium. However, the simulations results show a higher absorption efficiencies of 50.945%, and 70.628% for conventional sparger, and novel helical sparger, respectively. This work shows that a properly designed CFD simulation can help to optimise the scrubber design and improve absorption performance.