Aplicação da metodologia pinch em uma rede de trocadores de calor de uma planta de etileno

Abstract

The present research focused on reducing the energy consumption of an industrial plant which produces ethylene from ethane, by reducing the utilities consumption. The present work used the Pinch methodology to perform the energy integration, in order to reduce the plant's operating costs, aiming to reduce its energy consumption, reducing the number of heat exchangers and the heat transfer area involved in the process. COCO simulation software was used to complement the data in literature. Another factor studied in this work was the relationship of the convective coefficients for a hydrocarbons mixture, both for streams with phase change, and for streams with a single phase. Correlations in the literature were compared with those found in the Hint software. With the implementation of the Pinch methodology and through the cost study it was determined that the best value for ΔTmin was 13 K, thus obtaining a reduction in costs with hot and cold utilities, representing savings of 30% per year, having a cost of US$ 1,280,331.63 with new equipment. However, this value is less than the saving value of hot and cold utilities in one year.