Crude Oil Fouling Mitigation by Products Thermal Management in Heat Exchangers

Abstract

The management and maintenance of process plants involves huge amount of money. In the maintaining the heat exchangers, fouling effect has been identified as one of the major cost which also contribute to loss of production when the exchanger is out of service. This is applicable in the oil and gas industries which involves fouling of crude preheat train as a result of asphaltene precipitation and other fouling factors. The rate of fouling in the preheat train has been identified to be a function of temperature difference in the heat exchanger between the thermal source and the crude flow. This study focus on reducing the rate of fouling by varying the flow rate of the high temperature products through the heat exchangers in order to mitigate the fouling rate of occurrence. The study was conducted using MATLAB SIMULINK. The crude preheat train of four heat exchanges network was modeled in SIMULINK. The model was simulated under various flow rates and temperatures. The results showed that at fixed products mass flow rate of 2 kg/s with flow velocity of 0.06 m/s while the crude inlet temperature were varied from 303 to 312 K, the rate of fouling drops with increase in inlet temperature. A consideration of constant crude inlet temperature of 303 K with varied mass flow rate of the products from 1.6 kg/s in the increment of 0.2 to 2.4 kg/s showed that the rate of fouling dropped most at lower product mass flow rate. The simulation is done over a period of 10,000 min. The fouling factor that is obtained from the simulation period is lower than the actual result. The average fouling factor for the crude oil through the heat exchanger network is approximately 0.003. KeywordsCrude oil foulingCrude preheat trainFouling factor