Experimental Facilities

At the heart of the FRI experimental facility are two commercial-scale distillation columns along with the equipment needed to support their operation.  The auxilary equipment includes low and high pressure reboilers, low and high pressure condensors, as well as a dedicated boiler and cooling water tower. The two columns have the capability to operate from deep vacuum in the low pressure column, to 500 psia in the high pressure column.  Every column has 48" internal diameter by 28 foot section, but the low pressure column also has a section 96" in diameter and 12 feet high.  Each column is equipped with a permanent, automated gamma ray scanning capability to provide liquid holdup measurements during the experimental runs. Visual observation and video recording is accomplished via windows strategically located on the columns.

Cross connections between the two columns allow the sharing of some auxilary equpiment and allow us to operated both reboilers and both condensors in parallel while operating the low pressure column.

Process control and data caputre are provided by a Yokogawa DCS and ExaQuantam historian.

The experimental unit was refurbished and debottlenecked between 2007 and 2009. It has been demonstrated to be capable of testing the full range of hyrdraulic capacity of all known column internal contacting devices, including the current generation of co-current flow trays.

Over our history, FRI has run a variety of test systems, but essentially all of the current experiments are done with three hydrocarbon binary systems; isobutane/n-butane (100 psia to 500psia), cyclohexane/n-heptane (4.5 psia to 50 psia), and paraxylene/orthoxylene (16 mmHg- 15 psia).

In May of 2011 windows and some additional instrumentation were added to the Low Pressure Reboiler. These additions are being used to better understand and model entrainment from kettle reboilers.