Mitigation of Fouling in Refinery Heat Exchanger Networks by optimal Management of cleaning

摘要

A method for optimizing the cleaning schedule in large continuously operating heat exchanger networks (HENs) such as refinery crude preheat trains is presented. The method is based on two heuristics: (I) discretisation of the operating horizon into a number of equally long periods in which cleaning decision are allocated and (ii) solution of the resulting mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem by a multiple starting point strategy and selection of the best locally optimal solution.