Research And Development Of Material And Enenrgy Balances Software For Revamped Kellogg's Large-Scale Ammonia Plant

Ammonia is an important chemical product and it plays a very significant role in the national economy. The process of ammonia production is a typical chemical technology, which includes material treatment, chemical reaction, heat and mass transfer, and product post-treatment. The process is long and complex. Besides, there are many equipments in the process. Furthermore, the production of ammonia consumes a lot of raw material, fuel and power. Since 1970' energy resource crisis, we have faced problems of both lack of energy supply and its higher and higher price. Meanwhile, the nations in the world have made more restrict requirements to environment protection. All these rigorous situations force the ammonia producers to perform technical implements for energy saving, capacity increasing and consumption reducing. The CHITIANHUA made its technical revamping to the traditional Kellogg's ammonia technology firstly by itself in China after widely collecting and researching the newest achievements for ammonia produce technology. The revamping had completed in 1996.Through exploring and operation for a couple of years, the objects of both production increasing and energy saving had fully approached.This Article made deep research to key process, such as wetting system of feed gas, richen solution technology for CO2 removal, moisture removal by molecular sieve, ammonia separation post-converter, and hydrogen recovery from purge gas bycryogenic process, also to the important operation sections including the primary reformer, the secondary reformer, the CO2 removal and the ammonia chilling process. Based on the works mentioned above, this Article established a lot of mathematic models to material and energy balances for whole equipments by utilizing the acknowledge of physical chemistry, the principle of chemical engineering, separation engineering, numerical analysis and computer technology. This Article expounds the thermodynamic models of properties and phase equilibrium. This research result uses theoretical calculation instead of some numerical method to resolve engineering problems. Retrofitted Kellogg's large-scale ammonia plant has complex loops and manyoperation parameters that are frequently changing. To counter this case, this Article developed some short-cut calculation methods that can rapidly lead to iteration convergence. It was already proved that the simulation results by the software developed in the work were corrected compatible to actual operation data in CHITIANHUA. These achievement can be used as basic data for further research of energy saving and consumption reducing for the enterprise, design institutes and some universities. Also the results can be used in enterprise administration, such as checking of consumption in its workshops, and correcting relative flowmeters.