Effect of Ship Motion on Amine Absorber with Structured-Packing for CO2 Removal from Natural Gas: An Approach based on Porous Medium CFD Model

摘要

Acid gases (H2S and CO2) must be removed from the crude natural gas. The process performance may be deteriorated because of ship movement on FPSO (Floating production, storage and offloading). This research aims to investigate the effects of ship motion on acid gas removal performance in the amine absorber with Mellapak 500.X structured packing. A simple cylindrical column (packed zone: 0.1 m diameter x 2.205 m high) was used as the domain for the calculations. A porous media CFD (computational fluid dynamics) model was developed in the framework of Eulerian two-fluid flows with user-defined functions (UDF) taking into account liquid dispersion, mass-transfer and chemical reaction in the packed zone. The effective interfacial area, CO2 concentration profile and mal-distribution factor were compared for two cases of vertical standing and ship motion.