Revamping of Crude Distillation Unit (original) (raw)

Pinch Analysis of Heat Exchanger Networks in the Crude Distillation Unit of Port-Harcourt Refinery

The pinch analysis of the heat exchanger networks in the crude distillation unit of the New Port-Harcourt refinery has been performed. This analysis is aimed at ascertaining the energy efficiency and operation of the heat exchangers used in preheating the crude. Process data of the heat exchanger networks (HEN) were collected to formulate a problem table and used in Aspen-Pinch ® software for pinch analysis of the networks. The software produced the composite and grand composite curves, the grid representation and target reports. From these, the minimum heating and cooling requirements of the entire network, the process streams not properly matched and the heat exchangers not properly placed were obtained. The analysis indicated that a total of 98916.1 KW hot utility, 8298.7 KW cold utility were not utilized within the network (poor process stream matching) and that ten heat exchangers were not properly placed. Hence the heat exchangers in the crude distillation unit need to be retrofitted to ensure adequate heat recovery, process to process integration and efficient energy utilization within the network.

Fuel saving due to pinch analysis and heat recovery in a petrochemical company

Nowadays, decreasing the amount of natural resources and increasing the price of it, motivates to consider energy conservation as a main concern of many process industries, especially oil, refinery and petrochemical plants. Pinch Analysis (PA) is a powerful method for identifying and selecting technical solution to improve efficiencies and provide an optimum procedure for energy saving. This paper analyses, the effectiveness of applying PA to optimize energy consumption for a given set of process streams in a Petrochemical Company in Iran. In this study, firstly, the interested process streams have been selected, maximum heating and cooling load are computed, and then composite curves have been drawn - by Matlab code - which provides a visual profile of the availability of heating or cooling from the process streams. Secondly, the cost of recovered heat is computed in terms of fuel saving, which confirms applying PA could save significant amount of fuel expenses for the company. Finally, the corresponded Heat Exchanger Network (HEN) has been designed, and the investment costs for heat exchangers have been computed in order to find out payback time of the investment costs which is approximately 17 months for this case study.

Industrial Application of Plant Crude Oil through Comparison of Heat Exchanger Network Synthesis Techniques

Journal of Petroleum and Mining Engineering, 2021

Since the last few decades, global energy demand has steadily increased, creating a critical issue, particularly in the industrial sector. Energy conservation is an important issue in process design. Heat exchanger networks (HENs) synthesis have been the most studied in recent decades as its effect on energy recovery between process streams is significantly important. Pinch analysis and mathematical programming have been used for the synthesis of HENs. The proposed approaches can achieve the target of minimum utility consumption and develop networks to obtain a minimum number of heat exchange units. This paper presents a study to compare the performance of the heat exchanger network synthesized via pinch technology and mathematical programming for a crude oil plant. In addition, an application of a ready program like THEN is utilized to solve the problem. Based on the extracted data, the HEN is designed via the above-mentioned techniques, then, the results are analyzed and discussed...