Abstract
The cold box heat exchangers are used in petrochemical and gas refinery industries. Here, an industrial complex cold box equipped with a number of plate-fins is simulated by computational fluid dynamics. The model predicts the outlet vapor fraction, pressure drop, and outlet temperature with average absolute relative deviations of 0.17%, 3.3%, and 12.89% for all streams, respectively. The influence of obstruction in streams B and C on the computational fluid dynamics results are studied. When stream B or C is blocked, the remaining open streams experience an increase in pressure drop, temperature, and vapor fraction, which negatively affects the heat exchanger's performance over a long time. Finally, the computational fluid dynamics results of the cold box are compared with those of commercial software Aspen-EDR. Even though Aspen-EDR predicts an acceptable mean temperature and vapor fraction (phase change) along channels, it calculates pressure drop incorrectly. So, Aspen-EDR, computationally efficient software, can be used for modeling of mean temperature and phase change of flow in an industrial multi-stream cold box.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
