AN IMPROVED FINITE-DIFFERENCE METHOD FOR FIXED-BED MULTICOMPONENT SORPTION

A new computational procedure based on the finite difference methods is developed to solve the coupled partial differential equations describing nonisothermal and nonequilibrium sorption of multiple adsorbate systems on a fixed bed that contains bidispersed pellets. In this numerical method, a solution-adaptive gridding technique (SAG) is applied in combination with a four-point quadratic upstream differencing scheme to satisfactorily resolve very sharp concentration and temperature variations occurring in the case of small dispersing effects. Furthermore, the method resorts to a noniterative implicit procedure for solving the coupling between the column transport equations and the adsorption kinetics inside the pellets, which may be particularly efficient when the particle kinetics equations are highly stiff. The numerical model will be tested for one-, two- and three-transition systems. The results are compared to available analytical and equilibrium theory solutions.