PIL’s representative, Dr. Lluvia M. Ochoa-Estopier, presented at the 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Spring Meeting in Austin, Texas on Monday 27 April 2015. This event brought together a wide spectrum of academic and industry specialists to the conference, at which speakers presented their papers in topics relevant to energy, cutting-edge research, new technologies, and emerging growth areas in the chemical engineering industry. Lluvia’s paper, entitled “Retrofit of Existing Heat-Integrated Crude Oil Distillation Systems for Energy Recovery” included a new optimisation-based approach to retrofit the existing crude oil distillation systems.

Under the 18th Topical Conference on Refinery Processing, the “Energy Conservation” Session, Lluvia’s paper introduced a new approach, which considers the distillation process and the heat exchanger network (HEN) together to find the operating conditions (e.g. furnace inlet and outlet temperatures, pump-around flow rates and temperature drops) and HEN retrofit modifications (e.g. add or remove a heat exchanger or stream splitter) that reduce energy consumption. The methodology provides industrially-applicable designs with decreased energy consumption and relatively few equipment modifications.

Lluvia currently works as a Research Consultant for Process Integration Limited and for The University of Manchester, UK. For access to this presentation,please go to our Download section.

About the 2015 AIChE Spring Meeting & 11th Global Congress on Process Safety: The AIChE Spring Meeting is the year’s key technical conference for practicing chemical engineers. A wide range of subjects relevant to the current needs of industry is covered. Plus, GCPS covers the critical needs of process safety practitioners more broadly and deeply than any other conference, including discussion of safety challenges/issues affecting refineries and petrochemical plants and solutions. The 2016 AIChE Spring Meeting will take place in Houston, Texas on 10-14 April 2016.