Retrofit with Exchanger Relocation of Crude Preheating Train for Crude Distillation Unit

Rapid population growth, increasing energy demand and consequently high crude oil price have been fundamental drivers of global economic growth which partially affect our living. The crude preheating train of the refinery in Thailand consumes high energy at the crude furnace. In this work, the optimization with graphical searching technique and the retrofit model of heat exchanger network (HEN) using stage-wise model from (Grossmann and Zamora, 1996) was applied to design the most profitable HEN of crude preheat train. The retrofit model with the relocation technique is applied to design HEN with using the existing exchangers. The design data is used for the base-case HEN of PTTAR refinery. For result, the retrofitted HEN gives hot utility saving of 13% furnace and 2.21 year of payback period with maximum profit of 391,454.62 $/year.