Metal Hump Support

A metal hump support is a support plate for a packed tower, made of stainless steel and shaped with a row of raised, arched humps across its top. It has two jobs. The first is structural: it sits on a ring or beams inside the tower and holds up the whole weight of the packing bed above it, along with the liquid held in that bed. The second is to let the gas and liquid pass freely, and this is where the hump shape matters. On a flat support, gas rising and liquid draining must share the same holes and get in each other's way. On a hump support they are separated: the liquid runs down to the plate floor and leaves through slots at the bottom, while the gas turns up into the hollow humps and passes out through openings in their vertical sides, well above the draining liquid. Splitting the two flows lets the plate open up enormously, 60 to 90 percent of its area is free, so it carries far more gas and liquid than a flat plate before anything floods, and the gas loses very little pressure crossing it.

A flat grid or beam-and-grating support is simpler, but it tends to become the bottleneck of the tower. Because gas and liquid must pass through the same flat openings, they interfere: the down-flowing liquid partly blocks the up-flowing gas, the effective open area is small, and at higher loads the support floods before the packing itself does, capping what the column can handle. A hump support removes that limit. By lifting the gas openings up the sides of the humps, above the liquid draining across the floor, it gives each phase its own path. The result is a much larger free area, a capacity often well above that of the packing it holds, a low and steady pressure drop, and no premature flooding at the plate. In a revamp it is the usual way to unbottleneck a tower whose old flat support is limiting throughput. Tell us your tower and packing and we will size the support.

The plate is built to match the tower and the duty. It is made in stainless steel, normally SS304 for general service or SS316 where the chemistry is more aggressive, and it stands up to a wide pH range, from about 1 to 14 depending on the grade chosen. As metal it works at high temperature, up to around 400 degrees. It is fabricated for any tower diameter from DN50 up to DN5000, and larger to order, in sections that pass through the manway for big columns. Its load rating runs from 300 up to 2000 kilograms per square metre, set by the plate thickness, usually 10 to 12 millimetres of section, and by the depth of the humps, so it can be built to carry a shallow plastic bed or a tall, heavy ceramic one. Give us the diameter, the packing weight and the service and we will specify the grade and the thickness.

A metal hump support goes into any packed tower where a high-capacity, non-flooding support is wanted under the packing. It is the base that holds up a bed of random or structured packing in absorption columns, scrubbers and stripping towers, and it is common in petrochemical, chemical, gas-processing and environmental plants, for example under the packing in a flue-gas desulphurisation scrubber or an acid-gas absorber. Its value in all of these is the same: it supports the bed securely while giving the gas and liquid an easy, high-capacity path, so the support never becomes the limit on what the tower can process. It is supplied with inspection and material certificates. Send us the column size, the packing and the operating conditions and we will design the support to fit.