(202c) Optimising Heat Exchanger Design to Reduce Size, Cost and Energy Consumption for Plant Expansion and New Projects

Revamping and debottlenecking plants is often a source of challenges as the initial design of large scale key equipment will not allow for significant over capacity. For example for a reactor feed/ effluent process an increase in throughput would typically require replacement of either the large ?Texas Tower' feed / effluent exchanger or the preheat furnace- both would incur significant capital and civil engineering costs; the latter would increase plant energy consumption. Alternatively application of hiTRAN tubeside enhancement to the feed/ effluent exchanger will allow the increased performance to be met without any other changes or costs. Pertinent use of enhancement technology can derive similar benefits in a range of applications, demonstrated through use of case studies. Also the successful use of hiTRAN in a key two phase application has significant implication for its specification in other new and existing two phase services.