Ehsan Esmaili - Khangiran Gas Processing Company (SGPC)

Nowadays, minimizing emission of sulphur bearing streams from Sulphur Recovery Units (SRU) is increasingly demanded due to strict pollution control regulations. The most widely used process in SRUs is Claus process. This process consists of two steps. In the first step, one-third of H2S is burned in the furnace to produce SO2 needed for reaction with remaining H2S in reaction section and sulphur production in the second step. Because of thermodynamic limits, high conversions call for low temperature catalytic converters employment. Due to exothermic behavior of Claus reaction, the converters should be operated at low temperatures but not lower than sulphur dewpoint and resulting condensation which deactivate catalyst active sites. Therefore, accurate estimation of dewpoint temperature is of highly importance. In this paper, a thermodynamic model which accounts bizarre behavior of sulphur vapor is applied to calculate dewpoint temperature.

Claus process, Catalytic converters, Sulphur dewpoint