Authors
Abstract
The petroleum refining industry is one of the largest users of distillation
technology. The crude distillation unit is one of the most important refinery operations
fractionating preheated crude oil into respective product fractions like Heavy Naphtha,
Kerosene, Aviation Fuel, Light Gas Oil, Heavy Gas Oil, Reduced Crude Oil, etc. It
uses heat supplied at higher temperature levels, and rejects almost equal amount of
heat in the condenser at lower temperature levels yielding a separation work of
mixtures. Therefore, it becomes important to study the energy and exergy of the crude
oil fractionation tower to analysis the energy efficiency.
The present study deals with a thermodynamics analysis, energy and exergy
efficiencies and the irreversibility rate for of the crude oil fractionation tower (AFT).
The results shows that the total irreversibility losses are 90.7 MW, 95% are
contributed by the AFT, and 5% by the furnace, for a flow rate of 159.2 kg/s of crude
oil processed. The energy efficiencies are 0.597 for the AFT, 1.0 for the furnace as we
are assuming adiabatic heat transfer in the process and 0.704 for the overall system.
The exergy efficiencies are 0.5867 for the AFT, 0.974 for the furnace and 0.638 for
the overall system. From the values of the energy efficiencies, exergy efficiencies, and
the irreversibility rate in spite of the decline of the fractionation unit equipments, it
shows that the operating conditions used (especially the temperature profile and the
pressure profile of the AFT and the flow rates of the different streams) gives the best
results.
Keywords
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