A numerical study on the absorption of water vapor into a film of aqueous LiBr falling along a vertical plate

Absorber is an important component in absorption machines and its characteristics have significant effects on the overall efficiency of absorption machines. This article reports a model of simultaneous heat and mass transfer process in absorption of refrigerant vapor into a lithium bromide solution of water––cooled vertical plate absorber in the Reynolds number range of 5 < Re < 150. The boundary layer assumptions were used for the transport of mass, momentum and energy equations and the fully implicit finite difference method was employed to solve the governing equations in the film flow. Dependence of lithium bromide aqueous properties to the temperature and concentration and film thickness to vapor absorption was employed. This model can predict temperature, concentration and properties of aqueous profiles as well as the absorption heat and mass fluxes, heat and mass transfer coefficients, Nusslet and Sherwood number of absorber. An analysis for linear distribution of wall temperature condition carries out to investigation the reliability of the present numerical method through comparing with previous investigation.