reduction of energy cost over a distillation column

Dear friend,

I'm sorry for replying so late.Bellow u can have some ideas about the CDU Main Fractionator energy reduction.


When we talk about the MF optimization we can be specific to some points:
1. Steam reduction - subject to stripping steam reduction
- in general the stripping steam it's use for flash point improvement and maybe for stripping some heavy parts of hydrocarbons in order to recover the lights part in the above fraction.
Depending the quality of crude, flash point specification can be achieved also without stripping steam ( so a steam reduction is subject to a energy saving and implicit to a cost reduction)
2. Stripping steam ratio should be a function of stripped products. In average a good report between stripping steam and draw product is from 8 to 24 kg steam/m3 of hydrocarbon product.
3. Bottom stripping steam, again is a ratio reported to the bottom product and also to the MF feed quality. A recommended value is from 8 to 24 steam/m3 of hydrocarbon product.
4. Another point is MF pressure reduction - it's a delicate subject, but an improvement in energy reduction and cost, result from this topic.Many refineries what to keep a higher pressure that is necessary for operation, but to maximize the profit an idea for energy reduction is top pressure reduction, that is specific to every unit
5. Energy heat balance, depending about the MF type, can have 2 and 3 pumparounds - the most important thing that a lot of people didn't understand is balance between heat you bring to the column and heat that you remove it with pumparounds.

There is no other things that you can do to to reduce the energy cost on a MF except this:

-steam reduction subject to products specification
- pressure reduction subject to energy saving
- overall energy heat balance Sum of Input - Sum of Output.

Start from a base case and try to do some scenarios(simulation) playing with the information above.
Hope it's a good starting point for you in this activity.Good luck!

Cheers,
Dragos