Dynamic and Control of an Absorber - Desorber Plant at Heilbronn

Abstract

The present work is based on an MEA absorption test campaign performed November 2013–January 2014 at EnBW's amine test pilot located in Heilbronn, Germany. The test campaign included transient step responses in steam, exhaust gas, solvent flow rate and in exhaust gas CO2 concentration. In addition, a test with simultaneous steps in all flow rates (exhaust gas, solvent and steam) was included.

A dynamic model of the Heilbronn plant was then implemented in the dynamic simulator K-Spice® and tested against the step responses at the plant. In spite of some stead state deviations, the model was able to capture the process dynamics very well. For dynamic studies one can therefore assume that the model is representative for the plant. In the work presented here, two different control configurations were tested: 1) Ratio control in combination with a slow feed back control on the CO2 out of the absorber and 2) Control of CO2 out of the absorber by lean liquid flow rate and a temperature sensor up in the desorber packing. Both structures involve only simple PID control loops and are thus easy to implement. The proposed control configurations were tested by simulations with 30% changes in flue gas flow and composition. Both configurations showed good performance during the simulation testing, but the second one was superior as well as excellent with respect to tight CO2 recovery control. This may be an important property in supervisory control schemes.