Simulation of sulfur trioxide production in an adiabatic multistage catalytic reactor
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Date
2018-06
Authors
Anis Salwani Rozman
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Abstract
The production of sulfur trioxide from sulfur dioxide gas is already gaining
global importance and thus this process needs to be studied so that the conversion of
sulfur dioxide is assured during its implementation in the chemical industry especially
in sulfuric acid industry. It is possible to simulate sulfur trioxide production process
with a well-developed simulation software such as Aspen Plus despite using the
numerical simulation like previous research works. Aspen Plus Version 8.8 is used in
this research study to simulate an adiabatic multistage catalytic reactor where sulfur
dioxide gas is oxidized into sulfur trioxide gas in the presence of vanadium pentoxide
catalyst. The simulation results obtained are compared with literature for validation.
The simulated results obtained by Aspen Plus generate 4% of general average error in
terms of the sulfur dioxide conversion, temperature and pressure outlet. From the
sensitivity analysis conducted, it is found that the molar composition of sulfur trioxide
increases lightly up to 0.082 at 2.5 bar of reactor inlet pressure while the reactor inlet
temperature shows no significant effect on the molar composition of sulfur trioxide
generated.