Parametric study of sweetening process of sour gas by Molybdenum oxide nanoparticles

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to study the application of nano-molybdenum oxide adsorbent in gas sweetening process. Experiments were made to evaluate the operating and geometrical parameters in the adsorption process. The process performance of H₂S removal from methane gas on molybdenum oxide nanoparticles was defined as the ratio of final concentration of H₂S on the initial concentration of H₂S. The effects of operating conditions such as operating temperature, pressure, the size of nanoparticles, the amount of H₂S concentration in feed stream, feed superficial velocity, and the bed length were studied in this paper. Different temperature values (65, 75, 85, 87 and 89 °C) and pressure values (10, 13, 16 and 19 bar) were applied on the adsorption bed with 19 cm length and 10 cm diameter. Two types of spherical and cylindrical nanoparticles were applied and the effect of different adsorbents diameters (54, 58, 73, 77 and 83 nm) on the process quality (C/C ₀ ) was investigated. Also, the effect of initial concentration of H₂S in the feed gas stream was surveyed. The optimum operating conditions for spherical and cylindrical types were the same, 16 bar and 85 °C. The adsorption capacity of 0.22 g H₂S/g MoO₂ and 0.19 g H₂S/g MoO₂ was achieved at the optimum conditions using nano-spherical and nano-cylindrical MoO₂ sorbent, respectively. Applying in our study two adsorption isotherms, the Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms, analysis of variance displayed a high coefficient of determination (R²) value of 0.989 for the Freundlich isotherm, indicating the satisfactory adjustment of the experimental data. The results can be interesting for related industries and can be applicable in process optimization.

Keywords:
Parametric study; Sweetening process; Molybdenum oxide; Nanoparticle Adsorbent; adsorption isotherm.