ISSN print edition: 0366-6352 ISSN electronic edition: 1336-9075 Registr. No.: MK SR 9/7 Published monthly

Investigation of natural gas dehydration process using triethylene glycol (TEG) based on statistical approach

Amin Hedayati Moghaddam

Department of Chemical Engineering, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

E-mail: ami.hedayati_moghaddam@iauctb.ac.ir

Received: 10 September 2022  Accepted: 22 October 2022

Abstract:

This study is aimed to discover and investigate the performance of wet natural gas dehydration process by absorption using liquid desiccant. Triethylene glycol (TEG) was used as liquid desiccant. The dehydration process includes absorption and TEG regeneration sections. The process was simulated in Aspen-Hysys environment and was technically analysed. A thorough analysis of dehydration process was performed. The effects of natural gas and solvent flowrate, overhead vapour rate, and distillation column pressure as operative parameters on the recovered TEG purity, water content of dry gas, reboiler duty, and TEG loss were assessed. Further, response surface methodology based on central composite design was used to design the experiments. In statistical approach TEG flowrate, distillation column pressure, and reboiler temperature were selected as operative parameters and reboiler duty, recovered TEG flowrate, and recovered TEG purity as responses. Analysis of variance was performed to find out the importance of each parameters. Statistical models were developed and optimization process was performed. The maximum obtainable recovered TEG purity was 0.9651 corresponded to TEG flowrate, distillation column pressure, and reboiler temperature of 2.91 kg mol/h, 40.52 kPa, and 190.97 °C, respectively.

Keywords: TEG; Dehydration; Design of experiment; Optimization

Full paper is available at www.springerlink.com.

DOI: 10.1007/s11696-022-02564-8

Chemical Papers 77 (3) 1433–1443 (2023)