Design and Thermo - Economic Analysis of Thermosiphon Reboiler

Abstract

The plant-engineering world usually regards Heat transfer work as the heart, a very vital part of any process plant whether the end product is electricity, gas, steel, petrochemicals etc. Though the thermal design of Heat Exchanger is carried out with the help of sophisticated software, a good understanding of underlying principles of exchanger design is essential to ensure accurate and efficient design.

Reboiler is designed to fulfil the requirement of partial vaporisation. Generally, reboilers are used at the bottom of distillation columns to fulfil the requirement of partial vaporisation. So, in such a case, a reboiler is introduce as it vaporises a part of liquid which is recycled and the remaining liquid is purged out through the bottom of the distillation column. Boiler is basically used for completely vaporising of a water into steam.Whereas, Reboiler is preferred to fulfil the necessity of partial vaporisation in process industries. Most of the reboilers are of shell and tube type heat exchangers with steam as their heating media.

Thesis covers the thorough analysis of reboiler from thermal and economic point of view. Main aim of this work was to acquire basics of thermal engineering and apply it for designing out and analyzing a reboiler with real project data. In thesis study, the results of HTRI calculations were compared with respect to manual calculations and the results were analyzed. Furthermore, study involves economic analysis of reboiler. This work gives the concise idea of the parameters to be considered while designing a reboiler.