drying tower in sulfuric acid production

One of the problems in the chemical engineering book I'm reading
(K.F.Pavlov, P.G.Romankov and A.A.Noskov, Examples and problems to the
course of unit operations of chemical engineering, 1979 translation
of 1976 Russian edition) mentions a drying tower in a sulfuric acid
production plant. They don't say which production process the plant
might be using.

I'm a little confused about drying towers and what the role of one might
be in a sulfuric acid plant. For starters:
(1) Is the purpose of a drying tower is to remove water (without necessarily
producing a solid as a result) or is it the purpose of the drying
tower to produce a solid, even if the solid might happen to have some
water molecules bound in it?
(2) Which production processes for sulfuric acid use a drying tower?
(3) What, if not a "drying tower", is the tower in question called?
The reason I mention this third thing is that I did a search for
information about sulfuric acid production and ran across terms
such as "Glover tower" and "Gay-Lussac tower" (of course, not
necessarily in the same process that the Russian book is talking
about), but not the term "drying tower". So either the Russian book
is talking about a different kind of tower or else it is usually known
by some other name. The descriptions of the Glover tower and the
Gay-Lussac tower don't sound like the descriptions of drying towers
in general I found on the web, but I might be too new at this stuff
to really tell.

Ignorantly,
Allan Adler
[Only registered users see links. ]

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