Heat Exchangers

Optimize Heat Exchanger Cleaning, Drastically Improve Operational Costs
Process facilities like yours use hundreds of heat exchangers, which foul over time, and can directly affect your production capacity, maintenance/cleaning costs, energy usage, and carbon footprint. But by using automated heat exchanger monitoring and trending from Emerson, you can optimize exchanger cleaning and maintenance and see up to a 10% reduction in energy and capacity loss. For a typical 250,000-barrel-per-day refinery, this equates to a savings of over $3.5 million a year.

Challenge: Heat exchanger fouling but can be accelerated by salts, sediment, catalyst fines, and asphaltene precipitation. However, due to the difficulty and perceived high cost of real-time monitoring, your heat exchangers are likely only checked periodically during field rounds. Operators using visual and manual measurement methods are unable to spot signs of contamination and over time build up occurs—impeding heat transfer, negatively impacting throughput, and requiring increased energy usage. Energy costs rise when fouling forces downstream process heaters to supply more energy because of heat transfer degradation in pre-heat exchangers. Increased demand on downstream fired heaters can also diminish throughput as operating temperature limits are reached, and can lead to decreased production, increased emissions, and hefty regulatory fines.

What if you could...

• Reduce capacity and energy losses by up to 10% a year?
• Increase process and asset reliability and minimize environmental risks?
• Know the optimal time to clean your heat exchangers?

Solution: Cost-effectively mitigating fouling issues requires an effective cleaning program that enhances operations, and eliminates the time and expenditures associated with unnecessary or schedule-driven cleaning. Emerson’s Heat Exchanger Monitoring solutions provide temperature and pressure measurements that are trended, chronicled, and analyzed to alert operators to potential fouling or design issues before they arise. Provide your operators with the tools to calculate heat transfer, exchanger heat-transfer coefficient, fouling factors, and the cost of degradation along with the insight necessary to understand intermediate bundle temperatures and heat transfer profiles. To learn how to improve reliability and reduce maintenance costs download our flyer.

Results: Implementing Heat Exchanger Monitoring solutions from Emerson can improve your turnaround planning by allowing you to avoid unnecessary work on clean bundles and schedule necessary work on fouled exchangers. Enable your maintenance personnel to preschedule precision cleanings that sustain optimal heat transfer and reduce operational slowdowns that can lower capacity loss by up to 10%. Reduce energy loss by up to 10% by lowering demand on downstream heaters and lessen your environmental impact by reducing emissions.