Letters intended for publication should ideally add extra detail to our articles (or offer corrections of course!) and not be too long, consistent with the detail they offer. As always, we are sorry that space and time prevent us from printing them all or sending personal replies. ED.
A maritime miscellany
With reference to the picture caption at the top of p505 in the August issue and for the avoidance of doubt(!), a ‘stripper column’ is a piece of oil refinery, or other chemical works, equipment. The column seen in the picture will have been employed in an upright, vertical position when in use, so as to form a tall tower. Its function would be to separate one or more components of a mixture of liquids from the rest. This would be achieved by running the liquid mixture down the tower while passing a gas stream either up (‘counter current’) or down the tower (‘co-current’).
In order to maximise the contact between the gas and liquid streams, one or other of two types of tower contents would have been employed, so as to increase the efficiency of stripping the desired component out of the liquid stream and into the gas stream. The two types of contents are either ‘packings’ or ‘trays’. The packings are small, solid pieces of various shapes and sizes, supported in the tower. Trays, as their name suggests, are arranged up the height of the tower. They fill the full cross-sectional area of the column but have a series of openings across their horizontal
