Water Removal from Natural Gas by Adsorption: Modelling and Simulation (FLUENT)

Water removal from natural gas is very important in order to prevent hydrates formation, corrosion in the pipeline and equipments and some of the industry need to meet specific water content within the product. The current and most commercial technology used nowadays is TEG Dehydrator but the weaknesses of this technology are regarding its size and much higher cost compared to other technology. Because of this, researches has been made to identify potential method and fortunately, now, one new technology that has been found to have high efficiency to remove water from natural gas is adsorption technology by molecular sieves Zeolite 3A. The main objective of this study is to confirm the effectiveness of adsorption method and its potential to overcome problems in TEG Dehydrator by performing the modeling and simulation of the whole process using FLUENT 6.3 Simulator. In using this software, the structure, geometry and grid of the pack-bed zeolite 3A adsorbent is modeled in Gambit and exported into Fluent for simulation and analysis. Before that, all parameters such as dimension of the bed, concentration and other important features should be identified first in order to obtain most accurate result for the simulation. The scope of study is basically focused on modeling and simulation of the adsorption process to get the most accurate result in order to prove the efficiency of this new method. The findings then will be evaluated whether it is proven or not that this new technology will be able to compete with current technology (TEG Dehydrator).