Arvin Ayazi - Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Arak University, Arak, Iran
Mehdi Hajjary - Mechanical Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Petroleum University of Technology
Meysam Soleymani - Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Arak University, Arak, Iran

Crude oil distillation process is a major consumer of energy and demands 35-45% of the total energy consumed in a refinery unit. The main target of this research is to maximize the heat recovery in this unit and minimize the required superheat flows. To this end, different raw crude oils have been studied to warm up in two different configurations to evaluate the performance of atmospheric distillation unit. The simulation results showed that the plant energy consumption in two proposed configurations of cold-to-warm and warm-to-cold is significantly reduced to 20.52% and 18.97%, respectively.

Atmospheric Distillation Column, Heat Integration, Heat Recovery, Energy Efficiency, Utility Water Consumption.