Simultaneous optimization of heat-integrated crude oil distillation systems

Crude oil distillation is important in refining industry. Operating variables of distillation process have a critical effect on product output value and energy consumption. However, the objectives of minimum energy consumption and maximum product output value do not coordinate with each other and do not lead to the maximum economic benefit of a refinery. In this paper, a systematic optimization approach is proposed for the maximum annual economic benefit of an existing crude oil distillation system, considering product output value and energy consumption simultaneously. A shortcut model in Aspen Plus is used to describe the crude oil distillation and the pinch analysis is adopted to identify the target of energy recovery. The optimization is a nonlinear programming problem and solved by stochastic algorithm of particle warm optimization.

Optimization of a crude distillation unit using a combination of wavelet neural network and line-up competition algorithm

The modeling and optimization of an industrial-scale crude distillation unit （CDU） are addressed. The main spec- ifications and base conditions of CDU are taken from a crude oil refinery in Wuhan, China. For modeling of a com- plicated CDU, an improved wavelet neural network （WNN） is presented to model the complicated CDU, in which novel parametric updating laws are developed to precisely capture the characteristics of CDU. To address CDU in an economically optimal manner, an economic optimization algorithm under prescribed constraints is presented. By using a combination of WNN-based optimization model and line-up competition algorithm （LCA）, the supe- rior performance of the proposed approach is verified. Compared with the base operating condition, it is validat- ed that the increments of products including kerosene and diesel are up to 20% at least by increasing less than 5% duties of intermediate coolers such as second pump-around （PA2） and third Dump-around （PA3）.

Exergy analysis of multi-stage crude distillation units

This paper aims effect on crude distillation to investigate the multi-stage units （CDUs） in thermody- namics. In this regard, we proposed three-, four-, five-, and six-stage CDU processes with all variables constrained to be almost the same except for the number of stages. We also analyzed the energy and exergy to assess the energy consumed by each process. Because additional distillation units would share the processing load and thus prevent products with low boiling points from overheating, the heat demand of the CDUs decreases with increasing stages and thus reduces the heat supply. Exergy loss is considered as a key parameter to assess these processes. When the exergy losses in heat exchangers are disregarded, the three- and four-stage CDUs have lower exergy losses than the five- and six-stage CDUs. When the overall exergy losses are considered, the optimum number of stages of CDUs depends on the exergy efficiency of heat integration.