This thesis pretends to be an introduction to the use of thermoeconomics in sulfuric acid plants. A reference plant with the followings features is examined: a sulfur burner which oxidizes hydrogen sulfide gases, a wet-catalysis process which is cooled by means of air quenching, and an absorbtion column that produces sulfuric acid of 78 wt.%. Moreover, the plant has two heat-recovery boilers that produce steam at 40 bar and 5 bar. The thermoeconomic evaluation consists of three steps: In the first step, an exergy analysis is performed by using the commercial software CHEMCAD and the tool CHEMEX, which was designed for this work and takes into account the activity coefficients of water and sulfuric acid in liquid mixtures for the calculation of the chemical exergies; In the second step, an economic evaluation is carried out in order to calculate the plant levelized costs by means of the PEC and cost estimating techniques; In the third step, both exergy and economic analyses are combined by distributing the levelized costs among all plant streams, regarding to its exergy value, in terms of a linear equation system composed of the cost equation of each plant component and some auxiliary equations. Finally, three possible cost-effective optimizations are studied regarding to the reference plant by applying the methods of the thermoeconomic optimization based on thermoeconomic key indicators.

Outgoing