Thermodynamics and kinetics of organic sulfur absorption in sulfolane-amine system

As the most commonly used process to remove organic sulfur from natural gas, sulfolane-amine process has been widely used at home and abroad. However, there is still a lack of mechanism research and basic data of kinetics and thermodynamics, which makes it difficult to accurately predict the industrial application results. Aiming at this problem, laboratory experiment and field application data of sulfolane-amine system were analyzed, and the factors influencing the absorption of organic sulfur in the system were studied from the aspects of reaction mechanism, gas-liquid equilibrium and mass transfer kinetics. Calculation model was established by correlating these factors, in which the rate factor and Henry coefficient of sulfolane-amine solvent were obtained from the regression of experimental data. The model can be used to estimate the operation parameters and absorb tower parameters of the organic sulfide removal process using physical-chemical solvent, and its simulation results for MDEA and sulfolane-amine are consistent with the actual operation, which can provide a theoretical support for the transformation project with the total sulfur contents in natural gas to meet the requirement of GB 17820-2018 Natural Gas.