Modelling and simulation of aerosol formation by heterogeneous nucleation in gas-liquid contact devices

This paper describes a new simulation tool for the prediction of aerosol formation and behaviour in gas-liquid contact devices such as absorbers, scrubbers, quench coolers, and condensers as well as multistage gas cleaning processes, respectively. Aerosol formation can impact severely the separation efficiency of gas cleaning processes. Aerosol or fog formation can arise by spontaneous condensation or desublimation in supersaturated gas phases. The rigorous description of the mass and energy transfer between the gas phase, the liquid phase, and the growing aerosol droplets leads to a system of partial differential and algebraic equations. For the solution of these systems, we have developed the plant simulation tool AerCoDe. This programme bases upon the linearly-implicit Euler discretization, which in combination with extrapolation permits an adaptive step size and order control. Typical simulation results of a multistage industrial flue gas scrubbing process are presented. It is shown, that experimental data can be confirmed if the number concentration of condensation nuclei as an input parameter is roughly known. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.