Application of heat integration in hydrocracking process

Abstract

Pinch technology has now developed into a powerful tool for heat integration of petroleum refining processes. Each process within the refinery has its own constraints against pinch analysis. In order to overcome these constraints, many applications and their solutions have been presented, such as decomposition policy and pressure drop considerations. These studies show that pinch analysis will only be suitable within the known limitations. In traditional refineries, the hydrocracking process is considered important due to the high pressures. The process converts gas oil feedstock into kerosene, diesel fuel and high-quality gasoline. In this paper, we have focused on the retrofitting of a typical hydrocracking process at Tehran South Refinery (Chevron License) operating at 130-180 atm with significant energy consumption. The potential and opportunities for heat integration in this process were considered. The objective of this study is to demonstrate how to apply alternative heat integration approaches, recover the maximum waste heat and maintain stable production while taking into account the operational constraints and plant equipment limitations. In this survey, several projects were identified which resulted in $870 000 annual saving in energy costs.  2010 Curtin

Application of exergy analysis to improve the heat integration efficiency in a hydrocracking process

“…In the previous related case, authors have studied the same hydrocracking process (Chevron License) and obtained favorable energy saving results. 2 But in this case pinch analyses of the process indicate HEN is operated efficiently. Therefore, exergy analysis is applied to significantly assist in quantifying the energy losses and the recoverable energy potential to improve the heat integration efficiency.…”

“…In the hydrocracking process, due to high pressure of the reactor section, which results in most expensive heat exchangers than separation section (see Table 2), decomposition was applied by dividing the overall problem into two subproblems based on pressure with specific parts of reaction and fractionation section. 2…”

“…In traditional refineries, hydrocracking process has been considered as an important process working under high pressure and also presenting considerable energy consumption. 2 In this process the wasted energy essentially is in the form of heat losses to the environment through effluent gaseous or fluid high pressure drop through valves between high and low separation units. The operational conditions of this energy wasted make them of no use by the process.…”

Studying the Role of System Aggregation in Energy Targeting: A Case Study of a Swedish Oil Refinery

“…Recently, Cui and Sun [13] used pinch analysis to assess opportunities for heat integration between currently separate preheating sections for crude distillation. Goodarzvand-Chegini et al [14] instead investigated retrofitting opportunities in the hydrocracking process, which is of special interest due to high pressure levels, which impose challenging constraints on operation and plant equipment. Walmsley et al [15] recently suggested a promising approach for automated energy targeting in retrofit situations, and applied it to a large-scale refinery case study.…”

Computational cavitating viscous liquid flows in a pump as turbine and Reynolds number effects

“…A centrifugal pump can work as turbine by using viscous liquids in hydrocracking processes to extract residual pressure energy in the liquid discharge from a high-pressure separator. 36 In this case, the turbine will be subject to a considerable performance degradation caused by the increased viscosity, which has been looked into in Li. 37 How the viscosity of liquid distorts the cavitation performance of a pump as turbine has not been clarified so far.…”