Amjed Ahmed Ali 1, Akram A. Al-Asadi 1, Abdulrazzaq S. Abdullah 1* 

1 Chemical & Petrochemical Techniques Engineering Department, Basra Engineering Technical College, Southern Technical University, Basra, Iraq

 

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ABSTRACT

Hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) is another villainous impurity within the ambiance of natural gas, which upon reaction gives birth to undesirable offspring during gas processing and desulfurization at a refinery. Operational risks include shutdowns and decreased production due to sulfur deposits in gas metering systems. This research is to model and analyze the operating parameters of the sulfur recovery unit via the HYSYS software. The sulfur removal unit was simulated utilizing two models; the first served as a Ping Robinson package, while the second employed Sulsim. The factors influencing the unit are feed circumstances, airflow rate, and catalyst type. Both models show that proper air flow helps turn H2S into elemental sulfur raising liquid sulfur content also it has been seen that the recovery of sulfur is linear to the flow rate of the reaction gas so an increase in gas flow rate from 450 to 500 kmole/h would enhance sulfur to 0.956 mole fraction. The airflow rate significantly influences the formation of liquid sulfur and diminishes H2S emissions. The optimization of temperature is noted to bring a striking improvement in the efficiency of SRU. For instance, operation at 20–25°C lower than the design specification also gave very high recovery rates (approx. 99.9% efficiency) without adverse environmental impacts. The Sulsim fluid package model aligns more closely with the actual values of the sulfur removal unit.


Keywords: Claus process, Sulfur recovery unit, Hydrogen sulfide, Sulsim, Sulpher, HYSYS.


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ARTICLE INFORMATION

Received: 2025-06-16
Revised: 2025-09-03
Accepted: 2025-10-11
Available Online: 2025-12-01


Cite this article:

Amjed, A.A., Akram A, A.A., Abdulrazzaq S, A., 2025. Optimizing the multi-stage claus process: A parametric sensitivity analysis on the sulfur recovery. International Journal of Applied Science and Engineering, 22, 2025157. https://doi.org/10.6703/IJASE.202512_22(4).004

  Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

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