Version 4.1 - Heat Transfer Enhancements
Petro-SIM 4.1 puts a particular focus on improving heat transfer operations, leveraging the expertise behind our energy analysis software to deliver fundamental improvements in the basic calculation methods and their utilization.
HX Monitor
Petro-SIM 4.1 includes a new HX Monitor Utility (requires extra license) that provides methods for calculating and tracking fouling in heat exchanger networks and optimizing cleaning individual exchangers, groups of exchangers or the whole network. HX Monitor works in conjunction with other parts of Petro-SIM to provide a complete solution allowing you to track fouling over years.
- Makes use of upgrades to data reconciliation for handling heat balance reconciliation using novel linearisation techniques for solution performance
- Allows you to define and track key performance indicators through the new KPI Utility
- Makes use of the integrated Petro-SIM Monitoring tools to let you build and automate applications that collect and analyze data on a daily basis
- Includes upgrades to these Petro-SIM Monitoring tools to give you better ways of trending data and filtering noise
Fouling analysis is particularly important for crude preheat trains, where you typically see the inlet temperature you achieve at the crude unit furnace drop over time as exchangers foul. It is usually a gradual change but it can increase dramatically in response to upsets or condition changes. HX Monitor provides you with the tools for analyzing the value of this drop in performance to help guide your cleaning efforts. It includes two key plots for looking at data, helping you see how overall performance deteriorates over time and what the benefits are of cleaning individual exchangers, groups of exchangers or the whole preheat train.
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| Benefits of cleaning individual exchangers | Drop in Furnace Inlet T over time |
Heat Exchanger
Petro-SIM 4.1 upgrades the steady state rating method for shell and tube exchangers, making use of the well-known Bell-Delaware method for calculating heat transfer coefficients and pressure drops for single phase systems. Calculated results from this method compare and trend well with fully rigorous methods used in third party tools, striking a good balance between accuracy and calculation performance. We have also taken the opportunity to update a number of other aspects of the Heat Exchanger unit operation.
- Enhanced heat exchanger fouling calculations
- Additional results calculated by steady state rating method such as %overdesign
- Added TEMA spec sheet report
- Working in collaboration with HTRI, we have upgraded the integration with Xist to make communication fully two way so it is no longer necessary to use the separate Xist user interface. You can also switch seamlessly between the built-in rating methods and Xist without having to re-enter any data.
Fired Heater
The Fired Heater/Furnace unit operation now has kinetics to calculate and track coke laydown in furnace tubes. The predictions can be tuned against operating data to give you reliable estimates of coking rates. Further enhancements are:
- New tuning factors for coke and tube metal thermal conductivity
- Enhanced reporting for vapor and liquid properties on a tube by tube basis, adding density, viscosity, thermal conductivity and heat capacity to both liquid and vapor phase reporting plus wt% vaporized.
- New flux option that allows you to provide a flux profile
- Support for heat losses through negative fluxes
These changes apply to the Visbreaker, VGO Cracker and Coker Furnace operations in addition to the Fired Heater.
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