Abstract
The hydrodynamics and heat and mass transfer performance of inverted vertical spout direct contact exchangers are studied in this paper. Simple models are proposed for the performance of the spout for shattered and unshattered sheet flows, the latter representing condensers or evaporators with small inlet superheat. A semi-empirical model is presented for the spout shattered flow. The models are shown to predict the available experimental data reasonably well. Estimates are provided for gas desorption from the seawater in the exchangers.