A CORRECTION FACTOR FOR PREDICTING THE MULTICOMPONENT ADSORPTION OF AIR STRIPPER OFFGAS

Air stripping is a common way to remove volatile organic compounds (VO Cs) from drinking water with the off-gas from air stripping often requ iring treatment. The removal of the VOCs from the off-gas can be achie ved by adsorbing the VOCs onto granulated activated carbon (GAG). When the capacity for GAC to adsorb VOCs becomes exhausted, VOCs are again released to the atmosphere. A previous model of the GAC adsorption pr ocess used molar volume, V-M, as an affinity coefficient to predict th e breakthrough curves of the VOCs; however, an additional correction f actor, delta, which had no theoretical base was necessary to adequatel y fit multicomponent breakthrough curves. In this paper, Hilderbrand's cohesive energy density term, c, is applied as the correction factor providing a more theoretical basis for multicomponent adsorption. When c is applied to the V-M affinity coefficient, the heat of vaporizatio n (H-V) adequately describes the multicomponent data and does not requ ire additional correction factors to fit the breakthrough curves of a mixture of seven different chlorinated VOCs.