Kinetics of zinc oxide sulfidation for packed-bed desulfurizer modeling

The sulfidation process of porous zinc oxide sorbent with hydrogen sulfide can be described in five steps after external mass transfer and pore diffusion. They are surface adsorption of hydrogen sulfide gas on zinc oxide sorbent and dissociation of the gas molecule on the sorbent surface, followed by reversible surface reactions, sulfide ion migration under the surface, and sulfidation penetration into the solid crystallite. On the basis of the understanding of this chemistry, an empirical rate law for the intrinsic kinetics of the sulfidation process was derived in this study. Kinetics modeling results using this reversible, adsorption, and ion-migration (RAIM) model were found, consistent with selected experiments of single-particle sulfidation. Modeling results were also comparable with several well-defined sulfidation models in the literature. The intrinsic kinetics of a porous ZnO sorbent G-72E were measured in a microflow packed column and calculated using the RAIM model, using a finite difference approach. The effective pore diffusivity of gaseous hydrogen sulfide in the porous zinc oxide pellet was calculated using the general process modeling system (gPROMS). Finally, design calculation for a full-scale packed desulfurizer was performed using the gPROMS distributed reactor model. Case studies were presented for hydrogen sulfide removal from natural gas in a simulated fuel-processing train for syngas production.