Development of a High Performance Separation Process for Hydrogen Sulfide Enrichment in Acid Gases Mixtures

Taghi Zoghi, A.; Hossein Nejad Maki, H.; Mahdyarfar, M.; Pakseresht, S.; Zare, M.; Bakhtiari, A.

Development of a High Performance Separation Process for Hydrogen Sulfide Enrichment in Acid Gases Mixtures

Document Type : Review

Authors

A. Taghi Zoghi ¹

H. Hossein nejad Maki ²

M. Mahdyarfar ¹

S. Pakseresht ³

M. Zare ³

A. Bakhtiari ⁴

¹ Gas Division, Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (R.I.P.I.), P.O. Box 14665-1998, Tehran, Iran

² Shahid Hashemi Nejad Gas Refinery Company, Sarakhs, Iran

³ Research and Development Management of National Iranian Gas Company NIGC, Tehran, Iran

⁴ Naftoon Arya Engineering and Consulting Company, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

In the present work, a process is developed thatcould separate hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) from acid gases with high selectivity. In this process, the main affecting parameters are: type of solvent, process layout and operating conditions. Due to limitation of commercial process simulators, the generic alkanolamines are investigated in this work. By using HYSYS process simulator software, in the first step, among the diisopropanol amine (DIPA) and N-methyldiethanol amine (MDEA) as selective absorbent of hydrogensulfide, the MDEA is selected as solvent. In the next step, by applying the experimental design techniques, the operating conditions regarding to the defined objective function, for three different processes layout are optimized. The optimum results for each case show that the second layout has maximum objective function and selectivity (the objective function is 1.6225 and the selectivity 3.3278) while regarding total energy consumption of the process, third layout with the value of total energy consumption 1.0´10⁸ kCal/h is the best layout.

Keywords

Absorption process

Sulfur recovery

Acid gas enrichment

Selective absorption

N-methyldiethanolamine