Packed tower problems

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Packed Tower Problems

2. Packed Tower Problems The price we pay for success is the willingness to risk failure. −Phil Jackson, NBA basketball coach I never really liked packed towers, mainly because they cannot be inspected in the same way as trayed towers. Once the packing is installed in a fractionator, foreign objects buried in the packed bed cannot be observed until the tower starts up. Then the buried obstruction manifests itself in an unpleasant manner, meaning, the tower floods and fails to fractionate. Trayed towers are different. After the trays are installed, I can crawl through every tray and inspect each component for proper installation and cleanliness. Even if there is only a single vessel manway, I can, and often will, check every detail for proper assembly. The one exception is closure of the tray deck manway . I imagine that packed towers have a potential for greater capacity than trayed towers. But the advantage is small. When a tower is 1 meter or less in ID, the use of trays becomes awkward and packing is preferred. Packing has a lower delta P than trays and hence may be favored for vacuum tower service. For wash oil service (i.e., de-entrainment) and especially in heat transfer pumparound service, I prefer to use structured-type packing. Some services are quite corrosive, and ceramic-type packing is required. However, in normal fractionation service, for new towers in nonvacuum service, the use of packed towers is a poor design practice. I'm quite sure this statement may be refuted by vendor-published


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Packed tower problems by Arif Ansari - Issuu