ABSTRACT
Natural gas is one of the leading source of energy. Raw natural gas mainly contains methane along with trace amount of other hydrocarbons and some impurities like H2S and CO2, which are very toxic and hazardous gas for leaving being. This gas is being treated in industry to remove the impurities before it is sent to the various industrial and domestic users. Due to instability of crude oil price in the global market and for the sustainable development, it is now important to optimize the existing gas sweetening plant with respect to economic and environmental criteria. A model of gas sweetening process is developed in Aspen Hysis V10 process simulation software and validated by plant data. Multi-objective optimization study is carried out by using I-MODE algorithm. Excel-based VBA codes are used to interlink Hysys model and I-MODE code. In this paper the effects of different independent variables such as lean amine temperature, feed gas temperature, regenerator feed temperature, and pressure are considered with their respective bounds and optimization study is carried out for two different conflicting objectives like damage index and CO2 removal, and so forth. The results are discussed and analyzed with their Pareto optimal set of solutions.
