COST OPTIMIZATION OF NEUTRALIZING AMINES USED IN DISTILLATION COLUMN OVERHEAD SYSTEMS

Crude distillation equipment is usually subject to the corrosive activity of acids. This problem could be mitigated by the addition of amines to reduce corrosion effects. The present work applies two different optimization methods, Nelder-Mead (NM) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), to reduce operational costs by adding neutralizing amines. This improvement was accomplished using an in-house software taking into account the following parameters: salt formation temperature, water dew point temperature, and pH in condensate vessel conditions. These operating parameters and the addition of amines were used to minimize the cost in four different case studies. Results show that a considerable cost reduction is possible in several cases when using the global optimization method. Nevertheless, the local search method was less successful in improving the given start point, getting stuck in local minima.