(357a) Tower Scanning With Frothview™ – A Quantitative Tool for Diagnosing Trays

The tower gamma scanning technique is well established in the process industries as a qualitative tool to help troubleshoot separation towers, both trayed and packed towers. In this presentation it will be shown that through careful and innovative application of the gamma scanning technique, quantitativeinformation about trays in separation towers can be extracted.

For trayed towers this will be illustrated by comparing data taken under very controlled conditions on a hydrocarbon pilot plant tower equipped with windows, with the data obtained from scans of the tray active area. Three sets of trays, designed to flood under jet flood, downcomer backup or choke flood mechanisms, were tested and studied. The experimental observations, tray model predictions, and scan data for each of these sets of trays under various operating conditions will be compared.  Based on this information it can be concluded that tower scanning can be used to generate quantitative information about tray performance.