(31d) Monitoring of Crude Preheat Train Fouling Using Aspen HYSYS Petroleum Refining

Fouling reduces the amount of heat being transferred and hence rest of heat needs to be supplied by furnace and hence it increases processing cost and amount of CO2 being generated. Furnace can take up the additional load to certain point, but once furnace is bottlenecked feed throughput needs to be reduced to keep the unit running. On mitigation through online cleaning may require expensive chemicals and shutdown of preheat train costs about 45 to 90 k$/ train. The preheat train is present in most of the refinery units such as FCC, Delayed coker, Hydrotreaters and so on. It is estimated that financial losses due to heat exchanger fouling in UK is 450 to 750 M$/year. There is considerable amount of literature material is available on the mitigation techniques and cleaning chemicals. But whatever the mitigation technique, fouling monitoring is indispensible in ensuring that that the cost of fouling is known so that a suitable mitigation technique can be applied and on time.

In this presentation, we describe a framework, where Aspen HYSYS can be used in conjunction with

Aspen Shell & Tube Heat Exchangers and Aspen Simulation Workbook to monitor the preheat train heat exchanger performance.