Development of Improved Ceramic Heat Transfer Media for RTO's

摘要

Ceramic media has been used as a heat exchange packing for regenerative thermal oxidizers for over 20 years. Within the past seven years, these systems have been applied to increasingly aggressive environments, which have in many cases degraded the ceramic media and thus deteriorated RTO performance. Over the past five to six years, improved media shapes and materials have been developed to combat the media degradation problems and help lower energy costs. The particular problems of thermal shock breakage and alkali glazing have been solved with new media choices. These new media offerings are currently operating in several RTO's as large as 120,000 SCFM. New lower pressure drop shapes have also been introduced in these new materials. Further improvement to ceramic media materials and shapes is ongoing. This paper will present the results of alkali-corrosion resistance tests on the available materials from actual RTO units, and in even harsher lab environments. This paper will also compare thermal shock as well as long-term thermal cycling effects to the traditional ceramics versus the latest materials. The economics of installing the latest high performance media in an RTO are very favorable, especially when considering the avoidance of un-planned downtime costs and media replacement costs.