Mass transfer and hydrodynamic characteristics of new carbon carbon packing: Application to CO2 post-combustion capture

A novel structured packing, the 4D packing, has been characterized in terms of hydrodynamics, effective area and gas side mass transfer coefficient. The increase of the 4D opening fraction allows to reduce pressure drop and to get a better capacity than Mellapak 500Y and 750Y, for which the geometric areas are similar. The 50% open 4D packing, 4D-50%, leads to effective areas which are higher than Mellapak 500Y ones, and doubled compared with Mellapak Plus 252Y ones. Effective areas for the 4D do not decrease when the opening fraction increases from 30 to 50%, this indicates that a non-negligible amount of droplets is generated at 50%. Gas side mass transfer coefficient had been measured with an original experimental method: water evaporation. Corresponding results seem to be in agreement with the literature, and with the fact that a large amount of droplets is generated. Correlations are proposed for both effective area and gas side mass transfer coefficient for the 4D-50%.The 4D-50% packing could be very interesting for post-combustion CO2 capture since it generates low pressure drop and a very high interfacial area. This will be further confirmed by an economic study for which the absorber plant will be designed with a rate based model

Performance characteristics of a new structured packing

A new structured packing using carbon fibres, called Sepcarb® 4D, is presented. This packing has several attractive properties, such as high voidage (ε=94%) and high effective area (a=420 m2 m−3). These properties are advantageous for packing used as a gas–liquid contactor for separation units. To determine the internal characteristics of this packing, we performed several experiments using a 150-mm-internal-diameter column. Firstly, hydrodynamics experiments were conducted using an air–water counter current flow to determine the pressure drop (for both dry and wet packing) and flooding point. Secondly, the mass transfer efficiency was determined in terms of HETP (height equivalent to theoretical plate) by total reflux experiments with an n-heptane/cyclohexane mixture at atmospheric pressure. Hydrodynamic performance and mass transfer efficiency were compared with those of packings generally used in distillation and absorption

Mundo. Mapas físicos. 1797 (1779)

Indice con las altitudes en 'toisas' de los montes principales.Nota con la situación de los principales volcanes

A new method of probing mechanical losses of coatings at cryogenic temperatures

A new method of probing mechanical losses and comparing the corresponding deposition processes of metallic and dielectric coatings in 1-100 MHz frequency range and cryogenic temperatures is presented. The method is based on the use of extremely high-quality quartz acoustic cavities whose internal losses are orders of magnitude lower than any available coatings nowadays. The approach is demonstrated for Chromium, Chromium/Gold and a multilayer tantala/silica coatings. The ${\rm Ta}_2{\rm O}_5/{\rm Si}{\rm O}_2$ coating has been found to exhibit a loss angle lower than $1.6\times10^{-5}$ near 30 {\rm MHz} at 4 {\rm K}. The results are compared to the previous measurements

Critical Review: On Catherine Wilson'S Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity

on C Wilson, Epicureanis

The material soul: Strategies for naturalising the soul in an early modern epicurean context

We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the ‘birth of subjectivity’ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which ‘I’ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative called ‘the mind-body problem’ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, “split off” the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substance—a split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of texts—neither a robust ‘tradition’ nor an isolated ‘episode’, somewhere in between—which have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretius’ De rerum natura that ‘the soul is to the body as scent is to incense’ (in an anonymous early modern French version). They neither assert the autonomy of the soul, nor the dualism of body and soul, nor again a sheer physicalism in which ‘intentional’ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (L’Âme Matérielle), they seek to articulate the concept of a material soul. We reconstruct the intellectual development of a corporeal, mortal and ultimately material soul, in between medicine, natural philosophy and metaphysics, including discussions of Malebranche and Willis, but focusing primarily on texts including the 1675 Discours anatomiques by the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy; the anonymous manuscript from circa 1725 entitled L’Âme Matérielle, which is essentially a compendium of texts from the later seventeenth century (Malebranche, Bayle) along with excerpts from Lucretius; and materialist writings such Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine (1748), in order to articulate this concept of a ‘material soul’ with its implications for notions of embodiment, materialism and selfhood