The petro-chemical industries are facing great challenges in terms of energy conservation and cost reduction. While fuel prices continue to climb, energy conservation remains a prime concern for these industries. It is always a common approach to install a feed-effluent heat exchangers around a reactors and distillation columns to integrate the energy in the overall process. For last few decades, pinch technology has been gaining significant importance to improve the efficient energy usage in process industries. Pinch technology follows a systematic procedure for energy saving in processes. At a starting point, thermodynamic concepts are invoked while calculating the minimum heating and cooling requirements in the process. Minimum number of heat exchangers required for the process is calculated to obtain the minimum energy requirements. These calculations can be performed without finalizing any heat exchanger network (HEN). The minimum energy requirements and minimum number of heat exchangers provide targets for the subsequent design of complete heat exchanger network which helps to determine the total annual cost of heat exchangers involved in the process.
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