IN-LINE PHYSICAL DESORPTION UNIT: MODELLING, DESIGN AND OPTIMISATION

C02 removal from natural gas stream is crucial as there are a number of high
C02 concentration gas reservoirs in the world. Physical absorption process can be
utilised to remove C02 since the feed pressure of natural gas stream is relatively high.
However, the excessive footprint of the flash drum has greatly reduced the feasibility
for the physical absorption process to be employed at offshore condition. Therefore, a
compact in-line physical desorption unit would be designed via numerical modelling
approach in current work. However, most of the available numerical modelling
approach are not suitable to model the desorption phenomenon. In current work, the
bubble nucleation and growth models were integrated with Computational Fluid
Dynamics - Population Balance Model (CFD - PBM) to model the non-equilibrium
desorption phenomenon. The bubble nucleation and growth models were written as
user-defined function (UDF).