MECS® Spent Acid Recovery Process
MECS® builds spent sulfuric acid recovery plants with our own innovative and world-leading technologies. Our processes and designs improve performance, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and emissions control for refiners and chemical processors.
Our expert engineers leverage over two centuries of combined experience acquired by MECS® and DuPont in building over 1000 acid plants worldwide, as well as in building and operating 10 DuPont own sulfuric acid plants. Our experts can customize our spent acid recovery process to regenerate sulfuric acid from spent acid and/or hydrogen sulfide for your refinery or chemical processing plant. Our solutions can meet stringent pollution requirements, even as they increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of your facility. And MECS® processes and plant designs feature our own breakthrough technologies, many of which have revolutionized performance, cost controls and quality for the sulfuric acid industry.
MECS® Spent Acid Recovery Process Description
Spent acid and/or hydrogen sulfide is burned at elevated temperatures to provide SO2 gas. In the case of spent acid, fuel is burned along with the spent acid in the combustion chamber, to achieve the required decomposition temperature. The wet SO2 combustion gas is then cooled in a steam boiler to recover energy prior to entering the primary MECS® DynaWave® Jet Scrubber . From the scrubber on, the process equipment arrangement will have some variation, depending on the amount of insoluble material generated in the combustion chamber.
In the contact section of the plant the gas is dried in a MECS® ZeCor® Drying Tower with MECS® Brink® Mist Eliminators and then flows to the main gas blower which is the primary mover in the plant. The gas flows through three passes of MECS® GEAR™ and Cesium Catalyst and their respective cooling equipment and is then absorbed with 98% sulfuric acid (H2SO4) in the ZeCor® Interpass Absorption Tower. The lean SO2 gas flows through another MECS® Brink® Mist Eliminator to remove fine mist particles, protecting downstream equipment. The clean gas is then reheated and enters the converter to complete the fourth conversion pass of SO2 to SO3 using MECS® Super Cesium Catalyst SCX-2000 to achieve the highest possible conversion. The resulting SO3 is absorbed in 98% H2SO4 in the ZeCor® Final Absorbing Tower. Brink® Mist Eliminators are installed in the final tower to ensure the stack gas will meet acid mist environmental regulations.
A Commitment to Innovation and Quality
Our focus and commitment to technology development are primary drivers for our business. MECS® design and technical service offerings are supported by a team of expert chemical and mechanical engineers, as well as state-of-the-art Research and Development facilities and staff. We are focused on continuing to achieve new performance gains, and to solve crucial plant operations bottlenecks. Our expert engineers can custom-design your sulfur burning acid plant to meet your specific application and environmental requirements. Our innovative solutions deliver consistently superior quality, emissions control, energy recovery, and efficiency, using technologies that typically reduce maintenance and lifecycle costs.
MECS® Global Website
Visit the MECS® global website.
-
What solutions can our experts customize for your business?
Strategically manage energy and cut costs
Get more
from assets, materials
and workers
Enhance operational performance and process safety
Integrate sustainable
planning company-wide
Transfer Knowledge and Transform Performance
-
Build Skills with award
winning employee training
Reduce Employee Incident and Injury Rates
Transform your work culture, operations and profits
Increase Reliability With Clean Technologies
Reduce Risks, Maximize
Returns and Minimize WasteImprove Reliability and operability of alkylation technology
-
Strategically manage energy and cut costs
Strategic and efficient energy management is key to business sustainability, and can deliver significant value. Our experts can customize the process and operational improvements that have worked for DuPont, as well as our proven cultural change methodologies, to help your organization get quick and lasting results. Our solutions help reduce energy costs, risks and carbon emissions, while strengthening operational excellence, profitability and competitive advantage.
Get more from assets, materials and workers
DuPont Asset Productivity consultants can help your organization optimize any aspect of your operating asset-base. Our integrated management processes and systems are designed to improve the cost productivity of your workforce, infrastructure and investments. Our expert consultants can customize our solutions to help you achieve new efficiency and effectiveness, improving your productivity, revenue, profits and operational excellence.
Christopher Smith
Global Practice Leader
Energy Efficiency ConsultingMENUEfficiency experts like Chris offer hands-on help
Fortune 500 firms turn to Chris and his industry-leading team for multi-million dollar energy and operations efficiency solutions. Chris delivers results for businesses in the oil and gas, mining and metals, chemical, petrochemical, and manufacturing industries, and beyond.
View Chris' presentation
Proven Energy Efficiency Methods and Results
-
Get more from assets, materials and workers
DuPont Asset Productivity consultants can help your organization optimize any aspect of your operating asset-base. Our integrated management processes and systems are designed to improve the cost productivity of your workforce, infrastructure and investments. Our expert consultants can customize our solutions to help you achieve new efficiency and effectiveness, improving your productivity, revenue, profits and operational excellence.
Strategically manage energy and cut costs
Strategic and efficient energy management is key to business sustainability, and can deliver significant value. Our experts can customize the process and operational improvements that have worked for DuPont, as well as our proven cultural change methodologies, to help your organization get quick and lasting results. Our solutions help reduce energy costs, risks and carbon emissions, while strengthening operational excellence, profitability and competitive advantage.
Garrett Forsythe
Global Solutions Architect
Sustainable OperationsMENUGarrett helps clients boost yields and savings
As one of our operations management experts, Garrett helps clients capitalize on energy and asset efficiencies, shrinking their footprint and costs. He's already helped save millions for oil and gas clients, as well as within DuPont facilities.
View Garrett's presentation
Can Energy Management Deliver Real Savings?
-
Enhance operational performance and process safety
Our Operational Risk Management and Process Safety experts draw on over 40 years of DuPont experience in managing hazards at our own facilities. Our customized solutions can help prevent safety and environmental incidents, to preserve your business continuity, capitalization and right to operate, and – most importantly – to protect precious lives. In addition, our proven processes can boost cost efficiency, productivity and quality.
Reduce employee incident and injury rates
As a world safety leader, DuPont experts can help you implement organizational and individual change management processes that transform your safety culture. We help your organization foster a fully-integrated commitment to safety at all levels, with practices that strengthen leadership and reduce costs. Our solutions boost morale, performance and productivity, and most importantly, help send your workers home safely every night.
Srinivasan Ramabhadran
Global Leader
Process Safety & Risk ManagementMENUProcess safety improves with experts like Srini
With 8 years in operations management and 17 years in safety consulting, Srini and his team of experts have helped to transform process safety performance and reduce operational risk for an international range of industries and clients.
Read Srini's presentation
Assessing Industrial Process Performance
-
Integrate sustainable planning company-wide
Our management experts can implement sustainable strategies within the framework of your business, turning your environmental efforts into broad-based cost and competitive advantages. We catalyze your organization to help you reduce costs, effectively compete, attract investments and strengthen engagement with key stakeholders. Our customized, integrated solutions quickly achieve measurable and lasting results.
Davide Vassallo
Global Practice Leader
DuPont Sustainable SolutionsMENUDavide's team helps make operations sustainable
Davide's group helps transform our clients' operations with solutions of unsurpassed breadth. We enhance environmental management, asset productivity and energy efficiency, and also offer emissions controls and other Clean Technologies for heavy industry.
View Davide's presentation
Maximize the Value of Your Sustainability Strategy
-
Transfer knowledge and transform performance
Our experts offer a full range of integrated learning technologies and engaging content to help your workforce develop critical skills. From classroom training tools to e-learning solutions to tailored, on-site seminars, our blended learning solutions help you bring your organization closer to its employee-development goals. Our training experts help you assess, build, implement and extend your corporate training programs, as well as evaluate their effectiveness.
Rosi Torriani
Global Solutions Architect
MENURosi helps leaders learn in innovative ways
With over nine years of expertise, Rosi designs leadership development programs, implementing innovative customized learning and development solutions and managing multidisciplinary teams.
View ROSI's presentation
Learning & Development Offering and Processes
-
Build skills with award-winning online employee training
Our training experts can help your organization develop employee skills while reducing training costs and enhancing productivity. Available in more than 30 languages, our award-winning on-demand DuPont eLearning courseware incorporates advanced online training technologies and highly engaging content. Its flexible and customizable features also make it simple to manage your users, curriculum and training components from start to finish.
Sam Ponzo
Global Practice Leader
Learning & Development SolutionsMENULearning leaders like Sam improve employee performance
As Practice Leader, Learning & Development Solutions, Sam helps clients achieve sustained improvements in operational, safety and learning and development performance.
Read Sam's article
Accelerating Skills Development: The DuPont Approach
-
Reduce employee incident and injury rates
As a world safety leader, DuPont experts can help you implement organizational and individual change management processes that transform your safety culture. We help your organization foster a fully-integrated commitment to safety at all levels, with practices that strengthen leadership and reduce costs. Our solutions boost morale, performance and productivity, and most importantly, help send your workers home safely every night.
Improve contractor safety and turnarounds
Our Contractor Safety Management experts implement the proven practices developed in DuPont capital projects, turnarounds and supplemental labor projects worldwide. We help business owners and contractor firms reduce contractor-related injuries, labor disruptions and capital losses. We can customize a solution for your organization that helps keep your contracted projects safe, on-time and on-budget.
Bob Krzywicki
Global Practice Leader
Employee Safety ConsultingMENUBob and his team help protect people at work
In 30 years at DuPont, Bob has honed his expertise in safety, operations, business management, and capital projects. For over 11 years, he has custom-designed solutions with the DSS safety team to protect our clients' employees and contractors worldwide.
View Bob's presentation
Sustaining World Class Safety Performance
-
Transform your work culture, operations and profits
Each of our expert consultants acts as a catalyst for business transformation. We can customize our management best practices to lead your workplace and work culture to become safer, more efficient and more environmentally sustainable. Our solutions facilitate change and enhance leadership and organizational development to deliver world-class workplace safety, footprint reduction, operations and capital effectiveness, and unsurpassed energy efficiency.
Simon Herriott
Global Managing Director
DuPont Sustainable SolutionsMENUSimon guides businesses, and our expert team
Simon draws on a 25-year tenure in business leadership, strategy and organizational development to direct DSS consulting teams. He helps organizations become safer, more efficient and more environmentally sustainable.
View Simon's presentation
The Savings of Safety
-
Increase reliability and lower costs with clean technologies
MECS® is the global leader in sulfuric acid plant design and technology licensing for the phosphate fertilizer, oil refining, metal smelting, and numerous other industries. Our expert engineers apply the combined experience MECS® and DuPont gained in building over 1,000 acid plants worldwide. MECS® offers solutions for a wide range of markets, including power, ferrous metals, cement, titanium dioxide, coal gasification, and chemical processes.
Steve Puricelli
Vice President
MECSMENUSteve helps design improved sulfuric acid plants
An expert in sulfur recovery technologies, Steve is responsible for commercialization of new technologies and all technical aspects of sulfur management solutions. Technologies include SolvR regenerative scrubbers and DynaWave® wet scrubbers.
View STEVE's presentation
Regenerative SO2 Capture: Recovering the Future
-
Reduce risks, maximize returns and minimize waste
Our Sustainable Operations consultants can help you strategize and prioritize initiatives and resources to optimize your operations. By customizing proven sustainability, energy efficiency, asset productivity and capital effectiveness solutions for your operations, we help you reduce risks, maximize returns and minimize waste. Our experts have delivered multimillion-dollar savings for the oil and gas, utilities, mining, chemical and transportation industries.
Juan Aguiriano
President, Asia Pacific
DuPont Sustainable SolutionsMENUJuan helps businesses achieve sustainable operations
An expert in environmental management, capital effectiveness, and energy efficiency strategies, Juan helps organizations improve return on operations while reducing their environmental footprint.
View JUAN's presentation
Achieving Sustainable Growth through Productivity Optimization
-
Improve reliability and operability of alkylation technology
World-leading STRATCO® technology helps refiners safely produce cleaner-burning gasoline. We license sulfuric acid alkylation technology to oil refiners and customize solutions. Our technology experts can work with you to assess and determine the right solution for your refinery. We support you every step of the way, from proposal, technology evaluation, and design through equipment fabrication, startup, and training.
Randy Peterson
Process Technology Manager
Clean TechnologiesMENURandy improves all areas of the alkylation process
With over 24 years of refinery expertise, Randy specializes in all things alkylation – from startup design and unit revamp, to operator training, to test runs and troubleshooting.
FEATURED
MECS® Sulfuric Acid and Environmental Technologies
See how world-leading MECS® sulfuric acid plant and clean technologies benefit the fertilizer, metallurgical, refining, chemical and other industries.DSS Contact Us
Connect DuPont Sustainable SolutionsSubscribe to eCommunications
Sign up to receive email communications with the latest case studies, white papers and other information on how to become safer, more efficient and environmentally sustainable.STRATCO® Alkylation Technology
See how world-leading STRATCO® sulfuric acid alkylation solutions yield cleaner-burning gas with high octane, low RVP, low sulfur, and zero olefins.
DUPONT PRODUCTS & SERVICES
DUPONT PRODUCTS & SERVICES
MECS® Sulfuric Acid and Environmental Technologies
See how world-leading MECS® sulfuric acid plant and clean technologies benefit the fertilizer, metallurgical, refining, chemical and other industries.
DuPont Operator Training Simulators (OTS)
We combine our technical expertise and owner/operator experience with our world-class safety culture to deliver a high-impact training program for your operators and engineers. By leveraging the power of DuPont’s high-fidelity dynamic process simulators students learn valuable troubleshooting and response skills in a realistic environment that models “cause and effect” relationships across the entire.
DUPONT BRANDS
DUPONT BRANDS
DuPont Sustainable Solutions (DSS)
Discover how our sustainable business consultants customize solutions based on DuPont best practices to help clients improve their triple bottom line.
INFORMATION & IDEAS
INFORMATION & IDEAS
-
ZeCor® Alloy Packing Brochure
Read the product and offering brochure to learn more about the features and benefits of using our ZeCor® Alloy packing support system. -
DynaWave® Application: Cement Kilns
To get more information on improving removal efficiency and protection against corrosion in cement kilns, please read the full bulletin on DynaWave® wet gas scrubber applications. -
DynaWave® Reverse Jet Scrubber
Read the short brochure to learn more about the application, features and benefits of using our DynaWave® Reverse Jet Scrubbers. -
ZeCor® Alloy Tech Bulletin
Read the DuPont Sustainable Solutions (DSS) ZeCor® technical bulletin to learn more about our ZeCor® Alloy corrosion-resistant and high-performance metal. -
Acid Coolers Technical Brochure
Download the MECS® engineered alloy products technical bulletin to get more information on the benefits and uses of our innovative FilmGARD®-5 Anodic Protection System offering. -
MECS® UniFlo® Technical Bulletin
Read the MECS® UniFlo® acid distributor technical bulletin to learn more about the uses and benefits of our ZeCor®-Z and ZeCor®-310M corrosion-resistant family of alloys in this application. -
Ideas for a Better Cleanup
Read the full article in Sulphur Magazine for more information on how DynaWave® wet gas scrubbers can help lower operating costs, allow greater flexibility, and lower CO2 emissions. -
Zecor® Piping System Information
MECS® ZeCor®-Z piping systems set the leading standard on prevention of leaks. The ultra-low corrosion rate of ZeCor-Z results in reduced maintenance costs. Read the brochure to learn more. -
ZeCor® Alloy Brochure
Download the ZeCor® Alloy technical bulletin to get more information on the benefits and uses of our corrosion-resistant and high-performance metals. -
MECS® WavePak™ Brochure
Read the brochure to learn more about how our MECS® WavePak™ ceramic porcelain packing can help your business increase both performance and savings.