Optimization of Exhaust Covers in Marine Scrubbers

The number of marine scrubbers installed in industry has been on the rise over the past decade and is expected to continue in the coming years. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that the design of the scrubbers enables as an efficient operation as possible. In this study, an optimization of the exhaust cover inside an in-line scrubber was carried out. The optimization was done by combining a computational fluid dynamics model working on a simplified geometry with the method of feasible directions in order to reduce the pressure loss caused by the exhaust cover. The design is constrained in both height and width of the points making up the exhaust cover to ensure proper drainage of water and to avoid invalid designs. It was found that the optimized design reduced the pressure loss by 42% compared to the initial design. Furthermore, the scalability of the original design was investigated with the same height constraint enforced on the design variables. The result of the scalability analysis showed that the radius of the exhaust cover for the optimal designs scales linearly with the diameter of the scrubber, while the pressure loss was found to increase quadratically as the diameter of the scrubber increases.