Rotary regenerative catalytic oxidizer for VOC emission control
- Engelhard Corp., Iselin, NJ (United States)
Thermal or catalytic oxidation has been widely accepted in industries as one of the most effective technologies for the control of VOC emissions. To reduce energy cost, this technology normally incorporates heat exchanger to recover waste heat from hot combustion exhaust. Among various heat recovery methods, it is known that the regenerative system has the highest thermal efficiency (> 90%). The normal regenerative heat exchanger design is to use ceramic heat sink material packed in a fixed-bed configuration to capture excess heat from outgoing hot combustion exhaust and use it later to preheat incoming cold VOC laden gas stream by periodically switching gas streams using valves. This paper presents a novel design of the regenerative catalytic oxidizer. This design uses a honeycomb rotor with discrete parallel channels as the heat transfer media on which catalyst is coated to promote oxidation reaction. Heat recovery of this unit is accomplished by rotating the rotor between cold and hot flow streams. The thermal efficiency of the unit can be controlled by the rotation speed. Because it can rotate between hot and cold streams at higher rate than that can be achieved by valve switching, the rotary regenerative catalytic oxidizer uses much less heat transfer media than that is normally required for the fixed-bed design for the same thermal efficiency. This leads to a more compact and less costly unit design. The continuous rotation mechanism also eliminates the pressure fluctuation that is experienced by the fixed-bed design using valves for flow switching. The advantages of this new design are demonstrated by the data collected from a laboratory scale test unit.
- OSTI ID:
- 679317
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-980632--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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