Crude oil fouling is a crucial problem in refinery heat exchanger network(HEN) that reduces heat transfer and affects routine production. Conventional strategy to mitigate fouling is to clean heat exchanger regularly and to optimize cleaning schedule accordingly. Backup heat exchangers are used in many industries with severe fouling concern in order to avoid reduction of heat recycle caused by taking the heat exchanger off-line
however
such practice has not been deployed in crude oil pre-heating systems. Hence
a method for fouling mitigation in HEN was proposed to optimize cleaning schedule with backup for key heat exchangers
which key heat exchangers were first identified and then simulated annealing algorithm(SA) was used to optimize schedule for fouling removal. A case study of crude oil preheat train showed that backup on key heat exchangers offered higher energy saving and better economic efficiency than current methods.