A Novel Sensitivity Analysis Method for the Energy Consumption of Coupled Reactor and Heat Exchanger Network System

Since the inlet feed and outlet product of the reactor generally are the cold or hot streams of the heat exchanger network (HEN), it is necessary to analyze the relation between reactor parameters and the energy consumption (EC) of a HEN based on integration. An integration-based sensitivity analysis methodology is proposed to analyze the relation among conversion, inlet/outlet temperature of a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR), and EC of HEN. Equations are derived to show their relations, and the influence of temperature on HEN is analyzed with both positions of inlet/outlet streams and reaction's endothermic/exothermic characteristics considered. The S-Q-T-X diagram is proposed to show the relation between reactor parameters and energy consumption of HEN, and perform the sensitivity analysis of the energy consumption along conversion; the results can guide the design of the reactors. A case study shows that, for the studied selective hydrogenation process from benzene to cyclohexene, the EC for producing a unit product can be reduced by 34.2% with the conversion of benzene increased to 0.6.