Q-PAC® Tower Packing

How It Works

Conventional packings spread liquid across plastic surfaces to promote gas-liquid contact. More surface area means more plastic, which means more resistance to airflow. Efficiency and capacity trade against each other.

Q-PAC's drip point structure disperses liquid into suspended droplets instead. Every surface of every droplet contacts the gas phase directly. The same open geometry that creates those droplets leaves no broad surfaces to impede airflow — efficiency and capacity improve together from the same mechanism. At equivalent gas velocities, Q-PAC operates well below its flooding point where conventional packings are already approaching theirs. (Flooding Curve Data)

System Design Advantages

When Q-PAC's higher operating velocity allows a smaller tower diameter, every downstream component scales with it. A smaller tower requires a smaller recirculation pump, a smaller mist eliminator, and less total packing volume to achieve the same treatment objective. The effect compounds across the system:

Standard sizing scenario: 50,000 cfm H₂S odor control scrubber. (Full Design Example)

Smaller-diameter columns also eliminate special transport permitting for oversized vessels and field erection costs that don't appear in a per-cubic-foot packing comparison but matter substantially on total installed cost. Documented across installations: 35–40% reductions in total tower cost. (Case History 53, Case History 54)

Operating Performance

Q-PAC's velocity headroom — the same headroom that enables smaller towers in new construction — becomes capacity reserve in existing systems. Scrubbers operating below Q-PAC's flooding limit can handle increased throughput without media replacement or tower modification, at a fraction of the cost of additional equipment.

Q-PAC's open bar-and-rod geometry is also inherently self-cleaning. Uniform spacing eliminates the dry spots and stagnant zones where mineral scale and biological growth accumulate in denser packings, reducing maintenance downtime and extending media service life.

For older towers on conventional media, retrofitting with Q-PAC recovers capacity and efficiency at substantially lower cost than new construction. (Case History 31)

Applications

Q-PAC is the specified packing for wet scrubbing and air stripping across municipal, industrial, and large-scale environmental applications: acid gas and odor control, VOC and HAP removal, groundwater air stripping, biological treatment, and high-capacity seawater flue gas desulfurization. Q-PAC is the preferred packing for seawater FGD systems at scales up to 8 million Nm³/h. (Seawater FGD Application Brief)

Design Your System with Lantec

Lantec's engineers will size your packed bed at no charge — and back the design with a performance warranty. Contact Lantec's technical department.