APPLYING THE HEAT INTEGRATION IN ORDER TO ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTANTS MINIMIZATION IN DISTILLATION COLUMNS

Due to the close relationship between the energy and environmental problems, recovering technology and optimizing energy consumption have a major role in environment protection by minimization the atmospheric pollutants such as SO_X, CO_X, NO_X. This minimization may decrease the greenhouse effect, and the ozone layer destruction. On the other hand, optimization of Energy consumption and its recovering may minimize the water and hot oil consumption at the heat exchangers (reboilers and condensers) in petroleum distillation columns, specially. The present research has been performed about the kerosene pre-fractionation unit of one of the country's oil refineries. This system includes two distillation columns with a simple arrangement. Considering that the distillation section consumes a great deal of energy in the chemical and petroleum industries, hence studying the ways in which we may decrease this consumption is of great importance. One of these retrofit solutions is the heat integration, which is going to be presented in this research with a different idea from the other previous methods. This method makes it possible to add a shell and tube heat exchanger for performing a part of condensation and evaporation operation which can decrease the heat duties of reboilers and one of the condensers. To this end , the distillation columns were studied in the process and then the proposed model of columns arrangement were simulated by heat integration with all input and output streams using the Aspen Plus software, version 11.1 and the Rad Frac model in this software. The result has showed itself as a save of 14.26%, 10.86% and 14.26% in energy, water and hot oil consumption, respectively. On the other handthis system will decrease emission of SO₂ and CO₂ to atmosphere, 28 kg/h and 837 kg/h, respectively.