Kinetics Modelling of CO2 Reactive Absorption from Natural Gas using MATLAB

Natural gas is a reliable source of energy. However, raw natural gas is also composed of impurities such as hydrogen sulphide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The removal of these acid gases is a significant operation in gas processing but amine solutions such as monoethanolamine (MEA), diethanolamine (DEA) and N-methyldiethanolamine (MDEA) can only treat natural gas containing less than 20% concentration of CO2. This research project mainly focuses on the kinetics modeling of reactive absorption of CO2 from raw natural gas, that uses aminated resin to reduce the CO2 concentration to 20% so that the current acid gas removal system at the gas refineries can further process the gas. As a starting point, a rigorous numerical mass-transfer model was employed to study the kinetics of the aminated resin, following the work done by Rinker et al [5]. The kinetics behavior was simulated in MATLAB. With the reaction rate kinetics found, together with the equilibrium constant found using the correlations proposed in past literatures, the liquid bulk concentration for the aminated system was determined