Fouling Mitigation Suite: GUI Development in Excel

The objective of this project is to develop a fouling prediction model in crude preheat
train (CPT) in refinery. Heat exchanger is a very important device of equipment that is
commonly used in industry such as petrochemical, processing and refinery plant. Heat
exchanger is used to transfer heat from a liquid on one side of a barrier to a fluid on
the other side without bringing the fluid into direct contact. The crude preheat train
(CPT) in a petroleum refinery consist consists of a setof large heat exchangers which
recovers the waste heat from product streams to preheat the crude oil. The
accumulation of unwanted deposits on heat transfer equipment results in reduced
efficiency of heat recovery. This phenomenon is called heat exchanger fouling. In
addition to this project, the research will be associated with the development of user
interface (GUI) for reading and writing data into the model. Fouling model is
developed based on the actual data taking from PETRONAS Penapisan Melaka
(PPMSB). The model will predict the fouling resistance, Rfonce the input which are
crude andproduct properties, crude and product mass flowrate, crude and product inlet
temperature and time. Rf will be used in the simulation of heat exchanger using
PETROSIM for the calculation of actual outlet temperature of crude and product. All
the product and crude properties is generated in the PETROSIM before it was
exported to the Microsoft Excel. The results which are the outlet temperature of the
crude and product obtained in the model will be compared with the actual data from
refinery plantafterthe reconsilation, to justifythe accurateness of the model.