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• What is the impact in the product quality if circulating refluxes return temperatures are not maintaining at design temperatures? Is it wise to reduce heat recovery in pre heat network for maintaining design pump around return temp at the expense of pre heat?

  Apr-2023

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Answers

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• Marcio Wagner da Silva, Petrobras, marciows@petrobras.com.br

  The temperature profile of a separation column is a key parameter for an adequate fractionating, for this reason it's expected deleterious effects over the final quality of the products or side streams if the temperature profile is below or above the parameters recommend by design.

  Reduce the heat recovery to maintain an adequate temperature profile in the distillation column can be interesting in some cases, bute reveals that you have a problem with your energy balance and recovery of the processing unit. Crude oil distillation units are the major energy consumer is a crude oil refinery and the energy is responsible for higher then 60 % of the operating costs of a crude oil refinery, furthermore the CO2 emissions is raised in an unefficient energy system, based on these data it's not recommended to deoptimize the energy balance of the processing unit even to improve the fractionating quality. In other words, if this is happened it's necessary a energy integration study (maybe through pinch technique) to identify bottlenecks and then propose alternatives to eliminate then.

  May-2023