Abstract
Nowadays, building new refinery units is very costly. Therefore, many retrofit projects to the existing crude oil distillation system are considered to increase the production capacity of the refinery by increasing the throughput.
The objective of this research is to retrofit the atmospheric crude oil distillation column to reduce the vapor load through the column. Therefore, as the vapor load decreases, the throughput can be increased. Simultaneously, the heat exchanger network, furnace and pumps are considered both to identify any bottleneck associated with the retrofit procedure and to ensure an energy-efficient column design by reusing the available heat effectively. This retrofit design procedure will be explored by applying the suggested modifications on an existing case study by the use of a computer simulation and pinch analysis packages.