Application of Plate Heat Exchangers into Crude Oil Preheat Trains

Heat exchanger enhancement technologies have been widely used into heat exchanger networks (HENs) retrofit of crude oil preheat train. However, the heat recovery is limited through the enhancement, which is restricted by the geometry of existing heat exchanger. Plate heat exchangers are widely used in energy-intensive process industries to increase heat recovery and reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the features of small minimum temperature approach and high effectiveness. Thus, plate heat exchangers are taken into consideration to replace conventional heat exchanger in crude oil preheat trains to enhance heat transfer coefficient and reduce energy consumption. A major limitation of applying plate heat exchanger is lack of reliable optimization method to exploit benefit effectively. Due to the high installation cost of plate heat exchangers, the optimization is based on the trade-off between energy reduction and capital cost. This work proposes a new methodology of application of plate heat exchanger in HENs retrofit with a fixed network structure. However, energy saving is limited without structure modification. Therefore, this work also presents a novel pinch method with the application of plate heat exchangers to provide cost effective retrofit with structure modification. Case studies highlight the benefits of the new approaches.