Cleaning Schedule Optimization of Heat Exchanger Networks Using Particle Swarm Optimization

TL;DR

This paper presents a particle swarm optimization approach to determine optimal cleaning schedules for heat exchanger networks in oil refineries, significantly reducing costs and improving energy efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a PSO-based method for optimizing heat exchanger cleaning schedules, achieving substantial cost savings and enhanced energy recovery.

Findings

23% reduction in cleaning costs

Savings of $1.236 million over 44 months

Optimized cleaning intervals improve heat recovery

Abstract

Oil refinery is one of industries that require huge energy consumption. The today technology advance requires energy saving. Heat integration is a method used to minimize the energy comsumption though the implementation of Heat Exchanger Network (HEN). CPT is one of types of Heat Exchanger Network (HEN) that functions to recover the heat in the flow of product or waste. HEN comprises a number of heat exchangers (HEs) that are serially connected. However, the presence of fouling in the heat exchanger has caused the decline of the performance of both heat exchangers and all heat exchanger networks. Fouling can not be avoided. However, it can be mitigated. In industry, periodic heat exchanger cleaning is the most effective and widely used mitigation technique. On the other side, a very frequent cleaning of heat exchanger can be much costly in maintenance and lost of production. In this way, an accurate optimization technique of cleaning schedule interval of heat exchanger is very essential. Commonly, this technique involves three elements: model to simulate the heat exchanger network, representative fouling model to describe the fouling behavior and suitable optimization algorithm to solve the problem of clening schedule interval for heat exchanger network. This paper describe the optimization of interval cleaning schedule of HEN within the 44-month period using PSO (particle swarm optimization). The number of iteration used to achieve the convergent is 100 iterations and the fitness value in PSO correlated with the amount of heat recovery, cleaning cost, and additional pumping cost. The saving after the optimization of cleaning schedule of HEN in this research achieved at $ 1.236 millions or 23% of maximum potential savings.