Scale-Up of the Installations for the Biogas Production and Purification

Abstract

The current work deals with the scale-up phenomenon while designing the industrial scheme for biogas production. Within the framework of this problem the experimental investigations of the dependence of the biogas installation productivity on the work load have been carried out. The convincing data confirming the decrease of the work efficiency after increasing the work load beyond certain limit have been obtained, and the levels of this effect have been studied. The other result of the work is developing the model approach to the description of scale-up effect in the large-scale packing towers of wet-type for the purification of great volumes of biogas. The basic idea is to divide the whole height of a tower into several consecutive cells which are differ in different mass transfer coefficients averaged over the cross section of the column. The characteristic heights of the each such cell are determined on the basis of solving the hydrodynamic model, and the volumetric mass transfer coefficient corresponding to the average one in each cell is produced from the experimental data obtained on a small laboratory installation.