Identification and simulation model of mixed solutions of diethanolamine (DEA) and methyl diethanolamine (MDEA) for removal of acid gases

Abstract

Acid gases are often found in industrial and crude natural gas and represent technological problems to the environment and bad effect to the human health. The high-energy demand and processing restrictions make the amine absorption operation sensitive to any change in conditions. The mixture of diethanolamine (DEA) and methyl diethanolamine (MDEA) was developed as the removal of acid gases. The physical properties and the characteristics of the mixture were examined using FTIR, TGA and SEM-EDS and were described in this work. The HYSYS program were conducted in this work to reasonably predict removal amounts of acid gases from natural gas using the mixture diethanolamine (DEA) and methyl diethanolamine (MDEA) mixture as absorbents based on the plant specifications data from PT Pertamina (Persero)'s refinery unit. The correlations between the characteristics of the mixture and simulation model were revealed. The model predictions were in excellent agreement with the experimental data and the results were useful to represent the acid gas absorption process using alkanolamine solutions.