Oxygen Enrichment; the key for enhanced operations in modern Sulfur Recovery Units

The Lyunet Multiple Vortices (LMV) burner principle, applied by Duiker in SRU’s for decades has shown its unparalleled features as a high intensity burner and its extremely high mixing characteristics. This contributes greatly to the excellent performance both in combustion of eventual contaminations in the acid gas feed as well as to a high conversion yield from sulfur pieces into elemental sulfur.  Further improvement of these features remains challenging, but in Duikers search for excellence we came across oxygen enrichment and this chapter describes the possibilities that comes with this way of advanced SRU operation.

What we do 

Enhancing the SRU-operations with Oxygen Enrichment

✅ Do you want to increase the throughput of your SRU with 10-20% without major modifications and CAPEX investments? Or

✅ Do you encounter difficulties in getting the required furnace temperature in your SRU?

The answer may be: Oxygen Enrichment

Oxygen enrichment raises the flame temperature by eliminating the diluent effect on nitrogen in air. So this leads to several advantages:

  • Greater processing capacity for existing plants
  • Lower CAPEX due to smaller equipment requirements for new plants
  • Smaller tail-gas clean-up equipment
  • Lower reheater and incinerator fuel consumption
  • Increased Claus reaction furnace temperature, allowing use of lower quality acid feeds

The Key for Enhanced Operations

The Key for enhanced operations in SRU’s because oxygen enrichment allows for more throughput, higher reaction furnace temperature & better conversion efficiency against low CAPEX.

Superior Scalability & Flexible Configuration

The innovative mindset of Duiker has it made possible to invent trustworthy rules for scalability and flexible configurations for the principle of the LMV burner technology including the application for operation with oxygen enriched combustion air.

Ultimate Track Record

Oxygen in combustion applications requires state of the art materials and designs. Be assured your project is in the right hands. More than four decades of experience in Oxygen Enrichment ensures the right choices for your project.

Excellent Performance

The optimized choices for the famous 3 T’s for combustion, Temperature, Time and Turbulence greatly benefits to the excellent performance of the high intensity combustion process. These 3T’s will even be more enhanced by oxygen enrichment, enabling high conversion from H2S into Sulfur. Even with low quality feeds.

Solutions

The impact that we have on earth with our sulfur solutions

With over 40 years of expertise with oxygen enriched air in H2S combustion and decades of industrial process knowledge, Duiker has developed the best performing & scalable combustion technology available for oxygen enrichment in the market.

The Duiker Oxygen Enriched Air Combustion Technology differentiates three possibilities:

1. Low level oxygen enrichment (21-28 mol% O2 in combustion air)
2. Medium level oxygen enrichment (>28-45 mol% O2 in combustion air)
3. High oxygen level enrichment (>45-100 mol% O2 in combustion air)

In case of “Low Oxygen Enrichment” the oxygen will be fed in the combustion airstream upstream the main burner and will be mixed by a static mixer in the combustion air piping. The Main burner itself does not need any modification to allow for max. 28mol% oxygen in the enriched air stream. Hence this may be a relative cheap solution to increase the capacity of your SRU with 20-25% (based upon a typical acid gas feed stream of 70-90 Mol% H2S, this assumes no NH3 is present. If NH3 is present, less capacity increase can be achieved).

Above 28 mol% oxygen in combustion air special cleaning techniques and/or use of special metallurgy in applied equipment are always recommended for safety reasons.

Starting from oxygen percentages > 28% in combustion air, the oxygen will be fed to the burner with a dedicated supply lance and requires special materials, higher quality refractory materials (higher temperature resistance) and other burner modifications for functionality and safety reasons as well.

There are multiple processes applied for oxygen enrichment in SRU’s by different licensors. Duiker has references and experiences with a number of different licensed and/or non-licensed oxygen enrichment processes in Sulphur Recovery applications.

Reliable

Oxygen enrichment boosts the operation performance and with the right technology your SRU will be suited for reliable delivery of pure and high quality sulfur. Year after year.

Lowest TCO

Our high-performance combustion process, including Oxygen Enrichment combines sound engineering of a proven concept together with flexible, easy and reliable operations & controls, that coincides with your requirements. Your best recipe for the lowest Total Cost of Ownership.

Destruction of impurities

In the ideal world your acid gas does not have impurities. However there are always impurities in your feed, so you better get prepared. The LMV burner is ideally suited for the complete oxidation of all kinds of contaminants in the feed gas and oxygen enrichment will boost this functionality to high performance levels.

Unparalleled Installed Base

With over 1,900 references worldwide, Duiker’s LMV burner technology is the industry standard, providing decades of proven performance and continuous innovation.

Contact our team of experts for more information about our sulfur solutions

sales@duiker.com

Solutions

Sulfur solutions news and other solutions

Sulfur solutions news

Although the role of refineries will change greatly in future, we will continue to support them with our key equipment and services for sulfur recovery systems.

Meet us on one of the next shows. 

Clean energy

Allowing the world to apply clean hydrogen. Scalable ammonia to hydrogen conversion- and ammonia to heat solutions supporting the transition to a hydrogen economy and clean energy, based on years of experience with advanced ammonia combustion technology.

Reducing emissions

Optimise your process, limit your emissions & waste with our technological solutions. Our expert staff  provide monitoring, analysing, (re-) design and simulation services as well as advisory consulting services leading to optimal usage of your installations.

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