Mathematical modeling of volatile organic compounds removal over activated carbon

Abstract Volatile organic compounds removal from air is essential due to the health issues it can cause. An industrial temperature swing adsorption (TSA) unit is investigated over activated carbon. The comparison of industrial data with that of the model showed good agreement between them. The results showed that ethanol has higher adsorption capacity on activated carbon than diethyl ether and the roll-up phenomenon is observed for diethyl ether. Performance of the TSA unit is measured by calculating diethyl ether and ethanol recoveries. Moreover, an energy requirement is added into the model and multi objective optimization has been carried out. High model accuracy (R2) of 99.98 % is obtained for objectives indicating a good fitting. The suggested optimum variables were duration of heating step as 30 min, duration of cooling step as 20 min, regeneration flow rate of 400 kmol.h−1, and humidity of 0.001 in air.