Distillation Trays that Operate Beyond the Limits of Gravity by Using Centrifugal Separation

The interest of industry in super-high capacity fractionation trays has significantly increased in the last few years (Bravo and Kusters, 2000). This paper focuses on a comparison of these technologies, using available data from open literature. In addition new research data for the ConSep tray will be presented using state of the art gamma-scanning capabilities. Four tray technologies fall in this category — The shell swirltube tray, Jaeger COFLO tray, Koch-Glitsch ULTRA-FRAC tray and the shell ConSep tray. Publications on these trays have focused on a broad spectrum of applications—low liquid load operations such as glycol contractors (Weiland and Griesel, 2004) and low-pressure applications such as a hydrocracker main fractionator (Groenendaal et al., 2001) to high-pressure systems such as refinery superfractionators (De Villiers et al., 2005; Mosca et al., 2004a, b), debutanizers (De Villiers et al., 2004, 2005) and depropanizers (Wilkinson et al., 2006).