Abstract

Thermodynamic modeling of High temperature shift convertor reactor using minimization of Gibbs free energy

Author(s): F.Akbari, M.O.Ghabouli, M.Torabi

The equilibriumchemical reactions taken place in a converter reactor of the KHORASAN PetrochemicalAmmonia plant was studied using theminimization of Gibbs free energy method. In the minimization of the Gibbs free energy function theDavidon-Fletcher-Powell (DFP) optimization procedure using the penalty terms in the well-defined objective function was used. It should be noted that in the DFP procedure along with the corresponding penalty terms the Hessian matrices for the composition of constituents in the Converter reactor can be excluded. This, in fact, can be considered as the main advantage of the DFP optimization procedure. Also the effect of temperature and pressure on the equilibrium composition of the constituents was investigated. The results obtained in this work were compared with the data collected fromthe converter reactor of the KHORASAN PetrochemicalAmmonia plant and experimental data which has been extracted fromhandbook. It was concluded that the results obtained fromthe method used in this work are in good agreement with the industrial data and experimental data[12]. Notably, the algorithmdeveloped in this work, in spite of its simplicity, takes the advantage of short computation and convergence time.