Heat Integration of a Continuous Reforming Process

The continuous reforming process is an energy-intensive process. Therefore, it is worthy to perform heat integration on its heat exchanger network (HEN) to reduce energy consumption and gain economic benefit. In this paper, pinch technology is utilized to analyze and optimize the HEN of a certain continuous reforming process. The pinch calculation shows that the energy saving potential for the HEN is 8050 kW which accounts for 15.5 % of the heating utility. The unreasonable heat exchanges are identified, which are mainly the heat transfer across the pinch. The retrofit is then undertaken on existing network by removing the unreasonable heat exchanges with larger heat duty. Eleven new heat exchangers should be installed. Finally, the economic analysis of the retrofit gives the payback period of the investment as 0.78 y.