Abstract
Liquefied petroleum gas is an alternative, relatively clean and a supreme source of energy, which is being used as a key component in the global energy supply. The international trade agreements and the chemical and non-chemical demand of liquefied petroleum gas with the increase in the world’s population have brought its production from the processing of natural gas to the limelight. During its processing, a variety of different components are extracted from it, including methane and ethane which remains in the bulk as natural gas. The objective of this research work is to find the capability of investigating the liquefied petroleum gas recovery performance to make the process economical by saving the processing cost and energy. The novelty of this work is to deal with the design and simulation of a liquefied petroleum gas plant using Aspen HYSYS. To make this process energy efficient and economical, different schemes of process alternatives were applied by reducing the sizes of the exchanger and other pieces of equipment. Three cases are studied in which feed is precooled by rerouting the stream and/or by repositioning of the chiller for the recovery of liquefied petroleum gas from natural gas by analyzing their cost and process parameters. The modelling and simulation base case and three different case studies are realized in Aspen HYSYS. It has been observed that case study 2 results in about 10% increase in LPG production where the chiller is repositioned in the separation section of the LPG production flowsheet. Case study 3 shows a maximum decrease in hot side utilities in the flowsheet of about 20% while 10 and 14% decreases are observed for case studies 1 and 2, respectively. Furthermore, economic analysis indicates about 18 and 22% in the capital cost for case studies 2 and 3, respectively, due to the lower size of process units. The outcome of this investigation is to present plenty of suggestions to improve the process efficiency and minimize the requirement to over design the plant components.
Highlights
Energy consumption is an index which represents the industrial development and progress of any country
A comprehensive model for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) recovery from natural gas has been developed in Aspen HYSYS
In case study 1, the natural gas is rerouted through cold box 1
Summary
Energy consumption is an index which represents the industrial development and progress of any country. Due to increased globalization and urbanization, the energy resources are depleting rapidly. One of the clean energy resources is natural gas, which is a mixture of methane, ethane, propane, butane, and heavier hydrocarbons. Butane and mere propane are designated as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) (Liu et al, 2015; Faramawy et al, 2016). LPG is extracted from natural gas and is applied as fuel for multi purposes by providing energy to the vehicles and for cooking and heating appliances, and it is used as a refrigerant and aerosol propellant, hindering the damage of the ozone layer (Arteconi et al, 2010; Raslavičius et al, 2014; Hao et al, 2016). Pressurized steel vessels are used for its transportation, and a maximum of 80–85% LPG is allowed to be filled in the stated vessels to compensate for its thermal expansion during the change in temperature (Totten and MacKenzie, 2003)
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