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

Abstract

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 in detail.