Desorber Energy Consumption Amine Based Absorption Plants

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A computational model of the regeneration system of a monoethanolamine (MEA) based absorption plant for CO2 removal has been developed and used for an operational parameter study. Several parameters have been identified and varied over a given span in order to see the performance effects for the regeneration system, which determines the majority of the operational cost of the overall gas cleaning process. The results show that major energy savings can be realized by optimizing the loading level in the amine system as well as reboiler pressure. A more efficient heat exchanger followed by a flash prior to the desorber does not improve the overall stripping performance to a significant extent. The quality of equilibrium data is of crucial importance in the simulation and optimization of the desorber unit. They are much more important in the case for modeling the desorber compared to modeling the absorber.