Events

Solvent-based post-combustion carbon capture involves a sequence of mass and heat transfer operations — direct contact cooling, reactive absorption, and solvent regeneration — each placing distinct demands on column internals. The direct contact cooler must quench large-volume flue gas streams while managing liquid distribution and heat recovery. The absorber, often exceeding 10–15 meters in diameter at commercial scale, must deliver high CO₂ removal at minimal pressure drop, since blower energy dominates operating costs at near-atmospheric conditions. Packing geometry — surface texture, corrugation angle, and specific area — governs the efficiency-capacity tradeoff across all these services.

Scale-up from pilot to commercial introduces challenges in gas-liquid distribution, structural integrity, and maldistribution sensitivity that packing performance alone cannot address. This talk examines how pilot-scale characterization of structured packings, combined with rate-based process modeling, bridges the gap between laboratory data and commercial column design, translating hardware innovations into quantifiable reductions in capital and operating cost.

Anand Vennavelli holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Osmania University, India, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Oklahoma State University. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Texas.

Anand has over 18 years of experience spanning process control, separations research, and industrial R&D leadership. He previously worked as an Advanced Process Control engineer at the Phillips 66 San Francisco refinery and as a Research Engineer at Fractionation Research, Inc. (FRI), where he developed tray and packing correlations for industrial distillation applications. He is currently Global R&D Director for Mass and Heat Transfer Technology at Koch Engineered Solutions in Wichita, Kansas, leading development of next-generation column internals for distillation and carbon capture applications. He serves on the FRI Technical Committee and leads the Koch-Glitsch Mass Transfer School, training professional engineers globally on column internals, hydraulics, and separations fundamentals.

Anand is a recipient of the AIChE Separations Division FRI/John G. Kunesh Award and serves as Subject Editor for distillation and absorption for the Chemical Engineering Research & Design journal. He has served in multiple leadership roles within the AIChE Separations Division and as adjunct faculty at Oklahoma State University.