Abstract:
Alcohol factories has high energy consumption due to this fact it is necessary to integrate cold and hot Process streams to minimize the cost of heating utilities, the objective of this thesis is to investigate the current energy utilization system in BALF and prepare an optimal heat exchanger network for better utilization. Assessing the current hot stream and cold stream and identifying the pinch temperatures, designing and developing an optimized heat exchanger network and determination of the economic cost benefit of the designed heat exchanger network have been performed in this thesis.
Temperature, mass flow rate, specific heat capacity and purity of each relevant unit are measured. Aspen HX-net software is used to design the heat exchanger network as well as for evaluation of current system. This study applies the Pinch technique approach using Aspen HXnet software to design the heat exchanger network to retrofit the heat exchangers network of the BALF, with the aim to reduce utilities requirement and the associated gaseous pollutants emission. Minimum approach temperature range is tested between 1 and 12 0C. To minimize the probable number of heat exchanger network, recommended designs are generated before designing the optimum energy utilization heat exchanger network.
At the chosen ΔTmin of 10˚C, the minimum cooling and heating utility requirements of this study were determined as being 5805.5 kW and 433.33 kW respectively, by optimizing the network the heating and cooling requirements reduced by 10.610MW and 6.23MWwith a hot and cold pinch temperature of 85˚C and 75˚C respectively. It was observed that 4.38MW of energy could be recovered through process to process heat exchange integration which presented an energy saving potential of 41.20 %. It is recommended that results from this study could be used in the optimized network design of a heat exchanger network of BALF for improved energy efficiency. Considerations can also be made for other values of ΔTmin. The exchanger networks are implemented at payback period 2.5 year