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Caustic tower revamp

A customer contacted Sulzer to increase capacity while improving the CO2 removal in the existing CO2 absorption column of their ethylene plant. This was the third revamp for this particular column and continued improvements can be hard to find. A proper caustic tower design requires a proper understanding of CO2 absorption with caustic.

CO2 + 2NaOH Na2CO3 + H2O

Sulzer replaced the conventional random packing with NeXRing and modified the operating parameters to match the packing performance. The result was a 20% increase in capacity and a vapor outlet CO2 concentration of less than 0.32 ppm, well exceeding expectations.

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