Scale-Up of Bubble Column Reactor for Carbon Mineralization with Precipitated CaCO₃ Product

Carbon dioxide is the primary anthropogenic greenhouse gas. The rapid economic growth increased energy demand and fuel consumption, especially fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas. During their combustion, a large amount of CO₂ is released into the atmosphere, which harms the environment and causes global warming. In this work, the bubble column reactor (BCR) was used to absorb CO₂ with the carbon mineralization process because it is one of the most widely used multiphase reactors in the industry for gas–liquid reaction systems. Even though a bubble column reactor is one of the multiphase reactors that is easy to construct and operate, scaling up a bubble column reactor is difficult. Scalling-up was conducted by a similarity concept which is relatively simple and straightforward with three parameters used to assess the similarity between two columns (i.e., the ratio of liquid height to column diameter (H/D ratio) to obtain geometric similarity and superficial gas velocity (SGV) and superficial fluid velocity (SLV) to obtain both kinematic and dynamic similarity. This work was conducted using two bubble column reactors, having 7 and 11 cm inside diameter, respectively. Therefore, in this work, a simpler method will be developed to carry out the scale-up of a BCR in the presence of a reaction on the column. Thus, a concept widely used in implementing scale-up, namely the concept of similarity, will be used.