A case study is taken from a heavy crude (bitumen) upgrader,
where bitumen normally undergoes upgrading by coking and
hydrotreating to produce synthetic crude oil. After coking and
hydrotreating, the hot feed (104 C) goes through a hot separator
where the vapour stream is cooled through a condenser (E-10) to
43 C using the plant cooling water (CW) infrastructure. This
condenser has tube-side design pressure of 9660 kPa(g), and a
shell-side of 7440 kPa(g) (see Fig. 3). While this complies with API's
10/13th shell/tube pressure rule, the design pressure of both the CW
piping and an adjacent Hot Flash Vapour Condenser (E-11) is
1380 kPa(g). Fig. 4 shows a schematic of the two condensers within
the Battery limit of this coker-hydrotreater Unit. This is a good
example of a case where API 521 emphasis discussed earlier is
applied, in that the upstream and downstream system design
pressures are far lower than the 10/13th rule, and hence a dynamic