Li S., Zhang H., Meng S., Lu H., 2015, Improving Energy Efficiency for Refinery through Bottleneck Elimination, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 45, 1159-1164.
The improvement of the energy efficiency of existing industrial plants using a minimum investment is a very important task. The structural bottleneck check and elimination can play a key role in the retrofit. The heat transfer area of exchangers less than the required area have high probability of becoming the structural bottleneck of the existing network. The methodology of bottleneck identification jointly with Pinch Technology is described. With bottleneck identification and elimination the plant energy efficiency improved. For the case study, through operation parameters change and one additional heat exchanger added to the heat exchanger network (HEN) the final entrance temperature before being heated in the furnace was increased by 8 °C and heat transfer cross Pinch decreased 28.6 % compared with the original HEN.
