A Study on the effective parameters to increase production of sulfur recovery unit in the ilam refinery

: Sulfur is one of the most important side-products of gas sweetening operations, which is used in some areas such as sulfuric acid production and agriculture industries. Hence, improvement of the process in order to increase the efficiency in industrial scale (especially the Claus process) has been remained interesting among researchers in the past decades. Nowadays, computer simulation is one of the most well-liked methods in order to improve and analyses operating conditions of industrial units. Aspen® simulator is one of the most powerful and software package which is used in many chemical industries such as sulfur recovery process. The aim of this study is simulating Ilam refinery sulfur recovery unit using Aspen® simulator in order to increase sulfur production in the process. The steady state simulation result has 7% error in comparison with the real world data of Ilam refinery. The effective parameters on sulfur production including feed flowrate, feed temperature, furnace temperature and catalytic reactor temperature considered to analysis their effects on the sulfur production. The results show that the most effective parameters are furnace temperature and feed flow rate which can increase the sulfur production by manipulating the parameters. The sulfur production can be increased by 30% and 89% with increasing the furnace temperature from 315°C to 1040°C and feed rate from 300 kmol/h to 469 kmol/h, respectively.