CO2 removal from natural gas: A comparison of two simulators and a sensitivity analysis

JUAN PABLO GUTIERREZ; LEONEL ALBERTO BENITEZ; LILIANA ALE RUIZ; ELEONORA ERDMANN

Inverness

Simposio; 6th International Symposium on Energy Challenges & Mechanics (ISECM) ? towards a big picture; 2016

North Sea Conference & Journal LTD, United Kingdom

Simulating chemical processes is an important instrument for the design, optimization, control and decision making in industrial plants. The implementation of simulators allows engineers to evaluate different scenarios, configurations, equipment, process conditions, control schemes and make decisions respect to the operation instantly. Moreover, the advantage of working with simulation cases relies on the fact that they can be accomplished with minor costs and the absence of risks for the operators. However, the precision of the results, their reliability and feasibility depend on the similarity between the simulation performed and the process considered.The aim of this article is to simulate the steady state of a natural gas sweetening process using two simulators and establish a comparison. In particular, the input data and the conditions of the operating units are taken from a typical gas conditioning plant in northern Argentina. In this case, thegas under study is characterized for containing about 4% of CO 2 molar and a diethanolamine (DEA) aqueous solution is selected as the solvent of absorption. For simulating the steady state, two simulation software are employed, Aspen Hysys V8.6 and Aspen Plus V8.6. In the first of them, the Acid Gas thermodynamic package is used to determine the kinetic model and the propertiescalculation. Once the simulation converged, a parametric sensitivity analysis is proposed to identify the optimum operative conditions of this process through this simulator. For the simulation in Aspen Plus, the set of chemical reactions that take place in the absorber and the regenerator is introducedand the electrolite-NRLT package is assumed for the electrolyte thermodynamics.In the last section, a comparison between simulations results and a discussion of their implementation are detailed. It is observed that the obtained profiles from both simulators are quite similar and the relative error between them does not exceed 15% in any case.