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Unit 5: Applications

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 Heat transfer and energy conservation
• A VARIETY OF AVAILABLE energy conservation
measures can be adopted to optimize energy usage
throughout a chemical plant or refinery. The following is
a representative list of design or operating factors related
to heat transfer and energy use that can involve
optimization:

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• For example, the efficient firing of fuel (category 1) is
extremely important in all applications. For any rate of
fuel combustion, a theoretical quantity of air (for
complete combustion to carbon dioxide and water vapor)
exists under which the most efficient combustion occurs.
• Reduction of the amount of air available leads to
incomplete combustion and a rapid decrease in
efficiency. In addition, carbon particles may be formed
that can lead to accelerated fouling of heater tube
surfaces.
• To allow for small variations in fuel composition and flow
rate and in the air flow rates that inevitably occur in
industrial practice, it is usually desirable to aim for
operation with a small amount of excess air, say 5 to 10
percent, above the theoretical amount for complete6
combustion.
• Too much excess air, however, leads to increased
sensible heat losses through the stack gas.
• In practice, the efficiency of a fired heater is controlled by
monitoring the oxygen concentration in the combustion
products in addition to the stack gas temperature.
• Dampers are used to manipulate the air supply. By tying
the measuring instruments into a feedback loop with the
mechanical equipment, optimization of operations can
take place in real time to account for variations in the fuel
flow rate or heating value.

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• As a second example (category 4), a typical plant
contains large numbers of heat exchangers used to
transfer heat from one process stream to another. It is
important to continue to use the heat in the streams
efficiently throughout the process.
• Incoming crude oil is heated against various product and
reflux streams before entering a fired heater in order to
be brought to the desired fractionating column flash zone
temperature.
• Among the factors that must be considered in design or
retrofit sare
1. What should be the configuration of flows (the order of
heat exchange for the crude oil)?
2. How much heat exchange surface should be supplied
within the chosen configuration?
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• Additional heat exchange surface area leads to improved
heat recovery in the crude oil unit but increases capital
costs so that increasing the heat transfer surface area
soon reaches diminishing returns.
• The optimal configuration and areas selected, of course,
are strongly dependent on fuel costs. As fuel costs rise,
existing plants can usually profit from the installation of
additional heat exchanger surface in circumstances
previously considered only marginally economic.

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• As a final example (category 6), although heat
exchangers may be very effective when first installed,
many such systems become dirty in use and heat
transfer rates deteriorate significantly.
• It is therefore often useful to establish optimal heat
exchanger cleaning schedules. Although the schedules
can be based on observations of the actual deterioration
of the overall heat transfer of the exchanger in question,
it is also possible to optimize the details of the cleaning
schedules depending on an economic assessment of
each exchanger.

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 Optimizing Recovery of Waste Heat
• A variety of sources of heat at elevated temperatures
exist in a typical chemical plant that may be
economically recoverable for production of power using
steam or other working fluids, such as freon or light
hydrocarbons. The diagram in next slide is a schematic
of such a system.
• The system power output can be increased by using
larger heat exchanger surface areas for both the boiler
and the condenser.
• However, there is a trade-off between power recovery
and capital cost of the exchangers. Engineers and
scientists have proposed some simple rules based on
analytical optimization of the boiler ΔT.
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• In a power system, the availability expended by any
exchanger is equal to the net work that could have been
accomplished by having each stream exchange heat
with the surroundings through a reversible heat engine
or heat pump.

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• The system power output can be increased by using
larger heat exchanger surface areas for both the boiler
and the condenser
• In the boiler in as given in the figure, heat is transferred
at a rate Q (the boiler load) from the average hot fluid
temperature Ts, to the working fluid at TH .The working
fluid then exchanges heat with the condenser at
temperature T2 If we ignore mechanical friction and heat
leaks, the reversible work available from Q at
temperature Ts, with the condensing (cold-side)
temperature at T2 is

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 SEPARATION PROCESSES
Case study: OPTIMAL DESIGN AND OPERATION OF A
CONVENTIONAL STAGED-DISTILLATION COLUMN

• Distillation is probably the most widely used

separation process in industry. Various classes
of optimization problems for steady-state
distillation are, in increasing order of complexity
• Determine the optimal operating conditions for
an existing column to achieve specific
performance at minimum cost (or minimum
energy usage) given the feed(s). Usually, the
manipulated (independent) variables are indirect
heat inputs, cooling stream inputs, and product
flow rates. 18
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Equality constraints: For a conventional distillation column,
the following constraints are used:

For a conventional distillation column we have the following

typical relations:

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The following parameter values and equality constraints
should be given:

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 Fluid flow systems
• Optimization (and modeling) of fluid flow systems can be
put into three general classes of problems: (1) the
modeling and optimization under steady-state conditions,
• (2) the modeling and optimization under dynamic
(unsteady-state) conditions, and (3) stochastic modeling
and optimization.
• All three classes of problems are complicated for large
systems. Under steady-state conditions, the principal
difficulties in obtaining the optimum for a large system
are the complexity of the topological structure, the
nonlinearity of the objective function, the presence of a
large number of possibly nonlinear inequality constraints,
and the large number of variables.
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 OPTIMAL PIPE DIAMETER

• In this example we consider how the trade-off

between the energy costs for transport and the
investment charges for flow in a pipe determines
the optimum diameter of a pipeline.
• With a few simplifying assumptions, we can
derive an analytical formula for the optimal pipe
diameter and the optimal velocity for an
incompressible fluid with density ρ (rho) and
viscosity (μ).

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• In developing this formula the investment
charges for the pump itself are ignored because
they are small compared with the pump
operating costs, although these could be readily
incorporated in the analysis if desired. The mass
flow rate (m) of the fluid and the distance L the
pipeline is to traverse are presumed known.
• The variables whose values are unknown are D
(pipe diameter), fluid pressure drop (ΔP), and v
(fluid velocity); the optimal values of the three
variables are to be determined so as to minimize
total annual costs.
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Chemical Reactor design and operation

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• Other factors that must be considered in the modeling of
reactors, factors that influence the number of equations
and their degree of nonlinearity but not their form, are
1. The number and nature of the phases present in the
reactor (gas, liquid, solid, and combinations thereof)
2. The method of supplying and removing heat (adiabatic,
heat exchange mechanism, etc.)
3. The geometric configuration (empty cylinder, packed
bed, sphere, etc.)
4. Reaction features (exothermic, endothermic, reversible,
irreversible, number of species, parallel, consecutive,
chain, selectivity)
5. Stability
6. The catalyst characteristics
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Optimization in large scale plant design and
operation
• optimization of a large configuration of plant
components can involve several levels of detail
ranging from the most minute features of
equipment design to the grand scale of
international company operations
• An important global function of optimization is
the synthesis of the optimal plant configuration
(flowsheet).
• By synthesis we mean the designation of the
structure of the plant elements, such as the unit
operations and equipment, that will meet the
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designer's goals.
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• Figure 15.1 shows the relation of synthesis to
design and operation.
• You check a flow sheet for equipment that can
be eliminated or rearranged, alternative
separation methods, unnecessary feeds that can
be eliminated, unwanted or hazardous product
or byproducts that can be deleted, heat
integration that can be improved, and so on.

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PROCESS SIMULATORS AND OPTIMIZATION CODES

• Process simulators contain the model of the

process and thus contain the bulk of the
constraints in an optimization problem.
• The equality constraints ("hard constraints“)
include all the mathematical relations that
constitute the material and energy balances, the
rate equations, the phase relations, the controls,
connecting variables, and methods of computing
the physical properties used in any of the
relations in the model.

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• The inequality constraints ("soft constraints")
include material flow limits; maximum heat
exchanger areas; pressure, temperature, and
concentration upper and lower bounds;
environmental stipulations; vessel hold-ups;
safety constraints; and so on.
• A module is a model of an individual element
in a flowsheet (e.g., a reactor) that can be
coded, analyzed, debugged, and interpreted by
itself
• Optimization is done based on equation oriented process
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simulator and modular based simulators.
• In equation oriented approach, the equations can be
solved in a sequential fashion or simultaneously by
Newton's method or by employing sparse matrix
techniques to reduce the extent of matrix manipulations.
• Two of the better known equation-based codes are
Aspen Custom Modeler (Aspen Technology 1998) and
ASCEND (Westerberg 1998).
• Equation-based codes such as DMCC and RT-OPT
(Aspen Technology), and ROMEO (Simulation Sciences,
1999) dominate closed-loop, real-time optimization
applications.

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• In modular based approach, the process can be
represented on a flow sheet by a collection of
modules (a modular-based process simulator) in
which the equations (and other information)
representing each subsystem or piece of
equipment are coded so that a module may be
used in isolation from the rest of the flow sheet
and hence is portable from one flow sheet to
another.
• Each module contains the equipment sizes, the
material and energy balance relations, the
component flow rates, temperatures,
concentrations, pressures, and phase
conditions. 42
• Examples of commercial codes are ASPEN
PLUS (Aspen Technology, 1998), HYSYS
(Hyprotech, 1998), ChemCAD (Chem stations,
1998), PRO/II 1998 (Simulation Sciences, 1998),
and Batch Pro and Enviro Pro Designer
(Intelligen, 1999). Section 15.3 covers meshing
modularbased process simulators with
optimization algorithms.
• Two basic approaches for modular-based
process simulators exist:
1. Sequential modular methods.
2. Simultaneous modular methods.
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 Heat Exchanger Networks
• Heat Exchanger Network (HEN) is a system that enables
several streams to exchange sufficient amounts of
thermal energy so that they can attain the respective
temperature values (“targets”) specified by process
requirements.
• A HEN is therefore structurally implemented as an
interconnected set of liquid or gaseous streams
interacting in such a way that some of them (the
acceptors) gain a certain amount of energy in the form of
sensible or latent heat at the expenses of the others (the
donors).
• This thermal exchange obviously takes place in heat
exchangers, and therefore it is more convenient to
regard a HEN as a system of heat exchangers
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connected through their inputs and outputs.
• The first step in the energy integration analysis is the
calculation of the minimum heating and cooling
requirements for a heat-exchanger network. In any
process flow sheet, there are several streams that need
to be heated and there are some that need to be cooled.
• There are two laws for heat integration analysis. The first
law states that the difference between the heat available
in the hot streams and the heat required for the cold
streams is the net amount of heat that must be removed
or supplied.

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• In industrial processes there are streams that need
heating and streams that need cooling, usually achieved
by using hot and cold utilities, respectively.
• Heat exchanger network (HEN) synthesis is a mean to
obtain heating and cooling by process streams energetic
integration, by using heat streams to heat cold streams
and cold streams to cool hot streams.
• In this way, it is possible to reduce the amount of hot and
cold utilities. Besides the utilities consumption reduction,
it is important to use a small number of heat transfer
equipment, decreasing the fixed cost of the final network.

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End

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