Evaluation of an adsorption system to concentrate VOC in air streams prior to catalytic incineration.

Catalytic combustion is a well-developed process for the removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). In order to reduce both the amount of catalyst needed for incineration and the surface area of recuperative heat exchangers, an evaluation of the use of thermal swing adsorption as a previous step for VOC concentration is made. An air stream containing ethyl acetate and ethanol (employed as solvents in printing processes) has been taken as a case study. Based on the characteristics of the adsorption/desorption system and the properties of the stream to be treated, a monolithic rotor concentrator with activated carbon as adsorbent material is adopted. Once the temperature of the inlet desorption stream TD is chosen, the minimum possible desorption flow rate, WD,min, and the amount of adsorbent material can be properly defined according to the extent of the Mass Transfer Zone (MTZ) at the end of the adsorption stage. An approximate procedure to speed up the calculations needed for sizing the bed and predicting the operating variables is also presented. In the case studied here, the concentration of the VOC stream can reach 6 times that of the primary effluent when TD = 200 °C is chosen.

On the computation of fundamental measure theory in pores with cylindrical symmetry.

Classical density functional theories usually separate the formulation of the excess Helmholtz free energy in hard-body and energetic contributions. Fundamental measure theories (FMTs) have emerged as the preferred choice to account for the former contribution. The evaluation of geometrically weighted densities (convolutions) arisen in FMT for hard spheres in long cylindrical cavities is addressed in this paper. Previously, Malijevsky [J. Chem. Phys. 126, 134710 (2007)] reported expressions containing elliptic integrals for the kernels of the convolutions involving scalar and vectorial weights. Here, the set of kernels is extended to second and third order tensorial weights that introduce desirable dimensional crossover properties to the evaluation of the excess free energy. An alternative formulation for the convolutions, which greatly facilitates their computation, is also proposed. Integrals of the original kernels arise in this way and a set of expressions for them, again expressed in terms of elliptic integrals, is presented here. With the aim of providing a computationally simple framework to evaluate equilibrium density profile with cylindrical symmetry, a procedure based on direct minimization of the discretized grand potential energy, rather than employing the Euler-Lagrange equilibrium conditions, is discussed and used to identify differences between two FMT formulations, including or not second order tensorial kernels in very narrow cylindrical pores.