Exergoeconomic Analysis Applied in the Optimization of Refrigeration System in Ethylene and Propylene Production Process

Abstract The expectation of economic growth for the next years concerns the industrial sectors with a possible shortage in the supply of electric energy. The inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels has also been a constant source of concern. The use of fuels that emit large amounts of CO2 and CO is becoming increasingly environmentally unacceptable. All these reasons led the most developed countries to optimize their production processes in order to reduce energy consumption and one way to do this is to perform an exergetic and exergoeconomic analyses of the processes. In this context, for ethylene and propylene production process, exergoeconomic costs were determined based on Exergetic Cost Theory from Lozano and Valero making use of software Mat Lab version 7 to solve the matrices of this method.