Kinetic modeling of a commercial sulfur recovery unit furnace and comparison of results with industrial data

Sulfur recovery unit in gas refining industries is established to prevent dispersion of poisoning sulfuric compounds, especially H2S, to the atmosphere. In this paper a commercial straight through arrenged sulfur recovery unit furnace from sour natural gas have been modeled via aseries of complex kinetic models. The mass and energy balances accompanied with kinetic rate reactions were coded numerically by MATLAB programming software and the results of temperature and components profiles were presented and compared with the real outlet industrial data.Except two challenging existed for COS and CS2 components, precision of the outlet results of furnace were in good agreement with the real data. Average relative absolute deviation between model results and real data was less than 3%. Variables such as outlet H2S/SO2 ratio and H2Sconversion were considered as important responses of the furnace operation and their deviation were 3.8% and 6.5% from real results, respectively

Keywords:

Sulfur recovery unit , furnace , kinetic modeling , MATLAB programming , H2S consumption