Studies of CO2 absorption and effective interfacial area in a two-stage rotating packed bed with nickel foam packing

•A TSNF-RPB was developed with the purpose of simplifying the rotor of TSCC-RPB.•A novel "five-point" method was employed to determine mass transfer in this TSNF-RPB.•Nickel foam packing with open size of 0.64 mm has the highest performance.

A two-stage rotating packed bed with nickel foam packing (TSNF-RPB) was developed with the purpose of simplifying the combination of rotational packing and static rings in the rotor of a two-stage counter-current rotating packed bed (TSCC-RPB). A novel method called “five-point” was employed to determine the CO2 absorption efficiency (η) and the effective interfacial area (ae) in this TSNF-RPB. Experimental results showed that the CO2 absorption efficiency of the upper and the lower packing zones were obviously higher than that of the upper and the lower cavity zones at different rotational speed, gas and liquid flow rate. Values of ae of the upper packing zone were higher than that of the lower packing zone when the nickel foam packing with pore size of 0.64 mm was loaded. The TSNF-RPB has potential prospects for the applications of chemical processes which require long gas–liquid contact time.