Separation of Moisture from Natural Gas Using Membrane Separation

• Main Author: Alias, Alia Najiah
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi Petronas 2004
• Subjects: TP Chemical technology
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/8676/1/2004%20-%20Seperation%20of%20Moisture%20from%20Natural%20Gas%20Using%20Membrane%20Seperation.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/8676/

Natural gas is a vital component of the world's supply of energy. It is one of the cleanest, safest, most useful of all energy sources and gives many uses to the residentially, industrially and commercially. The natural gas has to be treated in several processing steps especially dehydration and hydrocarbon dew point in order to meet the required pipeline and quality specifications. The impurities especially water has to be removed in order to avoid the build-up of gas hydrates and to upgrade the gas pipeline specifications. For this study, membrane technology is the main concern as it is now becoming a new technology and one of the alternatives in gas separation beside the existence technology such as adsorption or cryogenic distillation process. The method used in carrying out this research project is through modeling using MathCAD software. The scope study is determination on the permeability of the pure methane and moisture, and the mixture of methane and moisture with respect to the changed in parameters such as pressure, temperature and pore size. The study is extended to analyze the selectivity (separation factor) of both gases with respect to pressure, temperature and pore size complete mixing model. Throughout the study, it could be concluded that the permeability is most favorable at higher pore size, temperature, pressure and moisture contents. The separation of moisture from the methane is most enhanced at the higher pressure and pore size but at lower temperature. By using the selected membrane with pores size equals to 0.4 nm, ~=0.272 and .=0.3676, the separation is proved to occur through the mathematical modeling using MathCAD. The results obtained are satisfied and fulfilled all the objectives of this study.