Thermal Performance Analysis for Optimal Passive Cooling Heat Sink Design
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1. Abstract
Crude oil distillation unit is considered as one of the most energy-intensive processes.
As well as being one of the biggest sources of greenhouse emissions. Due to increasing
energy prices and due to environmental regulations, the most economical and
environmentally friendly solution was to eliminate fossil fuel combustion and maximise
heat recovery (that is process to process heat exchange). Therefore, great deal of
research has been devoted to enhance crude oil heat exchanger network (HEN). This
project discusses new design methodology for crude oil HEN. The aim of the project is
to improve the heat exchanger network in terms of total costs as well as environment
protection.
This proposed methodology comprises of establishing the heat exchanger network
based on decomposition method. After that the network hot and cold streams
are matched, heat exchangers are modelled. This project considers shell and tube heat
exchanger and plate type heat exchanger simultaneously. An optimisation of the
network is then performed to minimise the network total costs by varying the network
minimum approach temperature. The proposed methodology been applied on a case
study to examine its efficiency.
The results showed 13.5% savings in total costs in the proposed network design over the
conventional network design and 12% reduction of CO2 emissions from the base case
design. Moreover, the optimisation of the network minimum approach temperature
resulted in $20My-1
more savings in the network total costs and 13.6% more reduction
in CO2 emissions.
Finally sensitivity analysis was conducted to examine the effect of changes in capital
and energy costs on the selection of the optimum network minimum approach
temperature and the optimum total costs.
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Appendices
A. Network streams in Sprint
A.1 The introduction of CDU unit streams to Sprint Software
As to the unavailability of the product streams target temperatures, it can be seen in
Figure A-1 that they were assumed to be 50.79 o
C. In addition, in order to have a heat
balance in the network, hot and cold utility streams were added to fulfil the network
demand of heating and cooling requirement.
Figure A-1 Stream data editor of Sprint
A.2 The problem table algorithm
Problem table was produced in all design cases to give the HEN minimum utility
requirement for a specified Tmin. Figure A-2 shows problem table results for the base
case.
Figure A-2 Problem table results in the base case
