(143c) Application of Dual Enhanced Wieland Tubes to Ethylene Services

Those dual enhanced tubes have been developed in copper by Wieland and are used as standard technology in the refrigeration and air conditioning industries for decades within shell&tubes heat exchangers for boiling and condensing services.

15 years ago, Technip and Wieland-Werke decided to jointly develop those solutions in steel for Oil&Gas applications to provide more compact and less expensive heat transfer solution but also to improve plant's energy efficiency thus lowering CO2 emission.

During ten years, independent laboratories have done intensive and detailed measurements on hydrocarbon for Technip and Wieland, to quantify the heat exchangers' performance improvements, using dual enhanced tubes. Those measurements alight 2 mains advantages of those tubes :

- Higher heat transfer coefficient, compare to conventional technologies

- Higher efficiency at very low temperature approaches, compare to conventional technologies

Since 2000, dual enhanced tubes have been successfully imported into both revamps and new plants designs within Polypropylene, Ethylene and LNG industries. Recently, Technip has applied dual enhanced heat transfer solutions in world-scale projects in the middle-east for the benefit for its clients.

This paper will present the result of a technical and economic study done by Technip and Wieland which compares plain, low finned and Wieland dual enhanced tubes technologies applied to Ethylene services considering identical process conditions.

Results show that dual enhanced design have a much lower equipment cost.

In Ethylene plants, where there are many shell&tubes heat exchangers with very large heat transfer surface area, the economic advantage of the Wieland dual enhanced tubes allows for an average cost reduction of 25% per heat exchanger generating substantial savings knowing that all heat exchangers' cost represents 20% of the whole plant equipment cost.

Additional savings in piping or structures are not included in our study, as well as further saving coming from improvement on the plant's efficiency.