Simulation and technoeconomic analyses of a stripper column of the naphtha hydrotreating unit of the petrochemical plant

Abstract This paper suggests a novel framework to retrieve the squandered heat of the Naphtha Hydrotreating Unit of the petrochemical plants. In this idea, the distillation tower’s output of the hydrotreating naphtha unit of the plant is employed as the working fluid to run an organic Rankine cycle with benzene. The procedure is evaluated comprehensively from energy, economic and exergetic point of view using Aspen Haysys software. An advanced case study, including sensitivity analysis, is provided for the Bouali petrochemical plant in Iran to realistically indicate the performance of the suggested configuration. The air cooler in the distillation unit of the aforementioned plant removes (squanders) about 3418 kW of energy, which an organic Rankine cycle can recover. Based on the findings, the exergetic and thermal efficiency of the suggested cycle is 82.53 % and 13.28 %, respectively, with a 1,3620kWh/day rate of energy production. According to the exergetic analysis, the ORC turbine has the highest exergy destruction rate of about 178.76 kW. Also, using the distillation tower squander heat as the heat source to the organic Rankine cycle leads to the least exergy destruction rate. Besides, the output exergy ratio of the whole integrated system to its input is 0.907. The suggested integrated system reduces the total energy consumption from 0.4 to 0.29 GJE/tonFeed with a total investment cost of 11.97 M$, in which the turbines have the highest portion of about 11.2 M$. Hence, the suggested plan’s total income is around 31.94 M$/year.