Causes analysis of liquid sulfur pool breakage and corresponding improvement measures

In actual production, sulfur is usually transported in liquid form.As an important facility for liquid sulfur storage, the casting and design of the liquid sulfur pool need higher requirements than the ordinary one, due to the particular medium it stores.The breakage may occur when the design is not appropriate enough.In this paper, the design features of liquid sulfur pools in a natural gas purification plant were briefly introduced firstly, and the reasons of its breakage were analyzed.Then the finite element analysis software Abaqus was adopted to simulate the temperature field of the liquid sulfur pool.The simulation results showed that the temperature of the concrete layer is more than 100 ℃.Besides, the deformation simulation of liquid sulfur pool indicated that high temperature environment is the inducement of the liquid sulfur pool breakage.Finally, a set of improving suggestions, in terms of the temperature control of concrete layer, material selection and operation optimization, etc., are proposed.