CFD Modelling of CO 2 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 CO 2 using water is a potential and cost-effective method; hence, this paper presents a simulation analysis of CO 2 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 CO 2 . The turbulent kinetic energy, the volume fraction of CO 2 , and hydrodynamics for both the spargers were determined. The results showed significant improvement in CO 2 absorption in the novel helical scrubber as it shows a CO 2 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.