New Clean Process for Barium Sulfide Preparation by Barite Reduction with Elemental Sulfur

In order to reduce the emission of CO2, a thermodynamic and experimental investigation has been carried out to develop a new process for converting barium sulfate to barium sulfide involving elemental sulfur. In this improved process, the starting raw material barium sulfate was reduced by elemental sulfur to produce barium sulfide. The results indicated that the main products of BaSO4-S reaction produces were solid barium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, which could be used for producing sulfuric acid. Thermodynamic analyses showed that the reaction of the barium sulfate decomposition by sulfur was a complicated gas solid reaction process with rising temperature. By simulation, the barium sulfate decomposition began at about 675 K and was completed at 1800 K. The thermodynamic and experimental results indicated that the rising reaction temperature and the increasing sulfur partial pressure contributed to reaction process. The decomposition temperatures of barium sulfate obtained by experiments were in a reasonable consistency with the simulation results, although they were a little higher than that obtained by simulation, due to the limited reaction time.