The theoretical predictions of a membrane gas absorption process in a hollow fiber gas-liquid membrane contactor using the Happel's free surface model were obtained under countercurrent-flow operations.  The analytical solutions are obtained using the separated variable method with an orthogonal expansion technique extended in power series.  The concentration in absorbent stream, absorption rate and absorption efficiency was investigated theoretically and experimentally with the absorbent flow rate, gas feed flow rate and CO2 concentration in the gas feed as parameters in simulating the membrane gas absorption system.  The improvements of device performance for increasing the absorption efficiency in a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen as the gas feed and pure water as the liquid absorbent were achieved as compared that to the concurrent-flow operation.  The device performance improvements were accomplished under the countercurrent-flow operation as confirmed in this work.  Both good qualitative and quantitative agreements between the experimental results and theoretical predictions are fairly good with the error analysis.

Performance improvement of countercurrent-flow membrane gas absorption in a hollow fiber gas-liquid membrane contactor

248th National Meeting (2014)

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