Heat integration and energy efficiency improvement studies for various new biobased chemicals processes

Client: Various 

Objective: Optimize energy efficiency of new processes 

Scope of work: Comprehensive heat integration and energy efficiency improvement studies have been conducted for several technologies and processes that are under development. The technologies include: BioEthanol, BioButanol, Sustainable Chemicals, Renewable Petrochemicals, etc. The studies aimed to design processes that will have maximum heat recovery at minimum investment costs and minimum impact on process safety and control complexity. Apart from standard heat integration study (the optimization of heat exchanger network), other process energy improvement solutions have been identified which include: pressure adjustments of distillation columns and fitting to the energy profiles of the background process, distillation column side reboilers and condensers, multiple-effect distillation column, mechanical vapour recompression, organic Rankine cycle, etc. These process improvements and energy-saving solutions reduced process energy requirement from 20% to up 50% in some cases, as compared to original process concept or design.