Design of SRU thermal reactor and waste heat boiler considering recombination reactions

The Claus process is commonly used for recovering sulfur from acid gases coming from oil and gas desulphurization treatment. Typically, a SRU is composed of a burner, a thermal reactor (TR), a waste heat boiler (WHB), and a train of sulfur condensers and catalytic Claus reactors. A model for the design of a TR and a WHB was described and was applied to two operating systems. For the first, inlet acid gas and combustion air compositions were given, and the TR-WHB system was modeled as a single plug flow reactor. For the second system, the model was applied to the WHB only, for a given combusted gas composition at the inlet of tubes. For system 1, the gas temperature was at uniform temperature in the TR and composition was about at equilibrium at the inlet of tubes. Recombination occurred and significant amount of H2S was formed. SO2 and CO2 were formed and consumed, respectively. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the CHISA 2012 - 20th International Congress of Chemical and Process Engineering and PRES 2012 - 15th Conference PRES (Prague, Czech Republic 8/25-29/2012).