Simulation and retrofitting of mass exchange networks in fertilizer plants

This paper presents a simulation technique for optimizing a hydrogen integration network. By applying this technique, the minimum fresh hydrogen consumption can be determined. Quantitative relationship between sources and sinks streams were studied to get the flow rates of coupled source and sink, hydrogen consumption and hydrogen concentration in each stream. The introduced technique was applied on twelve sources and twelve sinks with any purity of hydrogen concentration. The hydrogen integration network was designed through two steps, the first step considers applying the data given in the LINGO program, while the second step considers using the LINGO results in the introduced excel program to obtain the retrofitted hydrogen integration network. The proposed technique was applied on several case studies to achieve the minimum consumption of fresh hydrogen for the obtained hydrogen integrated networks. The introduced model for simulation and retrofitting of mass exchange networks is easy to understand and the results showed that this model is more efficient for fertilizer, petrochemical and refinery plants.