High-Powered Adaptive Valve Tray: A New Generation Tray Offers New Advantages

Valve tray as one of the most important mass transfer and heat transfer equipments for vapour–liquid is widely used in distillation, absorption and extraction units of petroleum, chemical and environmental industry. In order to overcome the drawbacks such as malfunctions, scaling and coking of common Glitsch V1 trays, a new high-powered adaptive valve tray (HAVTH), which integrates the high performance of fixed-valve tray and float-valve tray, is developed in this paper. The hydrodynamic and mass transfer performance of the HAVTH and V1 valve trays was experimentally studied with air–water– oxygen system in a φ600 mm stainless steel column. The results show that the HAVTH tray possesses better characteristics than V1 tray on the hydrodynamics and mass transfer.