Abstract:
The fertilizer industry is one of the largest industries in Pakistan and in terms of
GDP contributes the most to the economy. [1] Therefore, efficient production of
urea which is a key component in a fertilizer is very much desired.
The manufacture of industrial urea at FFBL requires CO2 extracted from process
syngas (containing CO2, CO and H2) and Ammonia (NH3) which is formed by the
reaction of H2 and N2 in a Haber-Bosch Reactor. [2] Our project relates to the first
part of the equation, which is the absorption of CO2 from process-sour syngas. We
were asked to dynamically model this absorption process and implement a
Distributed Control System (DCS) based interface.
The first part deals with conducting a parametric study on the CO2 absorption
process at FFBL to decrease the regenerative heat duty of the stripper column and
increase the overall recovery rate of CO2. Once that was done, we headed onto the
control part and simulated it onto our process by utilizing NI LabVIEW’s unique
control system environment and linking it with our system’s dynamic model on
Aspen HYSYS. The parametric study was followed by us redesigning some of the
equipment because this further took us to implementing better, more optimized
parameters on to our absorption process.
The control part objective was perhaps the trickiest to undertake because no prior
literature was found on the topic of linking the above aforementioned softwares.
Therefore, a third-party software, Microsoft Excel was used as a bridge between
the two and its macros was edited by coding in Visual Basic (VB) to customize it
for our process parameters.
