EXPAND PLANT'S CAPACITY WITH HIGH PERFORMCE TRAYS

Increasing capacity in major existing equipment, without compromising efficiency, is a key factor to economically meet revamp targets. When expanding plants throughput, one of the major key equipment to look at is the distillation column. Most of the equipment being used, such as pumps, exchangers, coolers, valves, piping, can be modified or replaced by bigger size with minor impact on the available layout space of the plant. For some other equipment i.e. fired heaters, reactors and distillation columns, the replacement could be very difficult, economically unattractive, or even impossible; they are in fact the true bottleneck of the potential capacity expansion of an existing running plant. It clearly appears the reason why, in the last 20 years, a lot of effort and research work have been done to develop new features, enhancing capacity and efficiency of the mass transfer components, with the scope of pushing the distillation columns to their ultimate limit set by vessel diameter. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the most advanced fractionation trays available in the petrochemical and chemical industries, such as Sulzer VGPlus TM High Performance Trays and Shell HiFi TM trays. Two successful commercial revamp experiences will be discussed in detail, where the use of the appropriate type of High Performance Trays yields to the most cost effective revamp solution for a De-Butanizer and a C3 Splitter.