Heat Recovery Systems Vol. 5. No. 5, pp.

441 ~ , Printed in Great Britain

1985

0198-7593i85 $3.00 + .00 Pergamon Press Ltd

VAPOUR

RECOMPRESSION

BY E J E C T O R S

S. KRF_J~t,J. KOMORKA,E. GEMZA, J. KAgPAR Institute of Chemical Technology,Pardubice, Czechoslovakia F. WERGNER Chemoprojekt Section of Automation, PRAG-Satalice, Czechoslovakia Ala~aet--Thermodynamic analyses using the concept of exergy are considered very important in analysing the energy balances of processes. This paper brieflydiscusses how such a technique can be applied to ejectors. INTRODUCTION Nowadays much attention has been paid to efficient usage of energy in chemical process systems. There are a number of publications which have been written about various methods of reducing external energy inputs. But from time to time we still meet wrong views, which focus the attention on the energy quantity only. The integral part of the analysis of technological processes is the thermodynamic analysis. The necessity of thermodynamic analysis of process systems has long been recognized and is becoming very urgent. In addition to the system analysis using the first law of thermodynamics i.e. evaluation of energy quantity, attention must be paid to evaluation of energy quality, based on the second law of thermodynamics. The consideration of the energy quality is not so usual as application of the first law, being sometimes neglected in spite of our knowing the principles of such an analysis for almost one hundred years (Gouy in 1889). Among several ways of applying the second law the concept of the exergy or the available energy has the greatest practical meaning. The analyzed system can undergo material, heat and work exchanges with the environment. Let mt and ht be the mass flow rate and the specific enthalpy of an input or output stream i to the system, qj be the rate of heat exchange with the environment at the temperature Tj and Ak be the work done by a part of the system. Then the first law of thermodynamics gives (if kinetic and potential energy contributions are neglected):

~, mth, + ~, q/ + ~o Ak = O.
i j k

(I)

The summations are to be carried out under the sign convention that heat and material inputs to the system and work done by the system are taken as positive. For the same system the second law of thermodynamics gives the following inequality:

re, s, + ~ q//T/~_ 0 (2) i j where s~ denotes the specific entropy of the stream i. The equality holds only for reversible processes. The relation (2) can be readily convened into an equation introducing an additional term a to account for the irreversible entropy increase, as follows rn~s, + ~ qj/Tj + o = O.
i j

(3)

Instead of stating the second law in terms of entropy, it will be much more useful to restate it in terms of work obtained by multiplying equation (3) by the temperature of the environment To and subtracting the result from equation (1):

~m,(ht- Tos,)+~qj I J

l -441

Ak-- Too =0.

(4)

442

S. KR~(:i e t al.

Steam from a boiler

Back pressure turbine

Fig. I

The term Totr is 'waste work' and can arise from numerous sources such as finite temperature driving force in heat transfer, mixing, throttling etc. Relative utility of energy levels can be expressed as available energy or exergy. The thermodynamic availability is related to the maximum possible work output or minimum possible work input when a system or fluid is taken from given specified state 1 to a specified state 2. Real processes are irreversible and maximum work output or minimum work input cannot be realized. The exergy difference between both states depends on the irreversibility of individual processes:

Ex2- Ex, = To~ As,

i

(5)

where As~ denotes the entropy change of a subsystem i (part of the whole system). The exergy balance is thus becoming the meaningful tool for the determination of the loss magnitudes and at the same time energy loss points in processes. Some principles of the approach w e r e mentioned in our lecture to the 29th Congress CHISA 1982 in Mari~insk6 L ~ n ~ and were formulated as the rationalization program of energy consumption in chemical technology processes. PROBLEM STATEMENT In processes of the chemical industry steam constitutes a very important part of the energy consumption. Steam is usually supplied from the power station as the outlet of a back pressure turbine with one or two pressure levels. For heating of process units the steam pressure is reduced to the required level. Schematically the situation is given in Fig. I. Absorbing a pressure drop across a restriction has been mistakenly accepted as not being wasteful because it is an adiabatic process. The energy of high pressure steam is, in fact, unprofitably annihilated. It can be visualized by the simple example: Steam pressure of the turbine output is 3.92 MPa. For the heating of units in the process system we need steam, pressures of 1.57, 0.588 and 0.294 MPa.

Steam pressure MPa 3.92 1.57 0.588 0.294

Steam enthalpy kJ k g - ' 2801.0 2793.0 2756.2 2724.4

Steam entropy kJ k g - ~deg- ' 6.0780 6.4284 6.7675 6.9991

Steam exergy El k 8 - '

1019.2 908.5 772.3 672.6

The temperature of the environment is considered to be 293.15 K. We can see that between the highest and the lowest pressure level the enthalpy difference is about 3 ~ but the exergy difference is more than 30~. The increase of the process effectiveness in the chemical industry can be reached by a full or partial elimination of the steam pressure reduction and replacing such an inefficient process by an alternative one. We have elaborated on the method of substitution of the waste heat streams recompression by ejectors for the wasteful pressure reduction. The method comprises the process

Vapour recompression by ejectors

443

Ejector
Motive steam _,---.L.--

Energy - accepting system

Energy - donating system Fig. 2 analysis in the sense of determination of energy-accepting and energy-donating processes. The analysis is followed by the synthesis of both types of processes in a suitable connection. The Steam recovery system is based on expanding motive steam to the process pressure through a steam jet ejector mounted over a source of a waste heat stream. The vapor is compressed to the required pressure of an energy-accepting process in an ejector (see Fig. 2.) By the described method we can reach important savings owing to the reuse of waste heat streams i.e. owing to a reduction of external energy inputs. If we, for example, take as waste heat stream an output stream with a temperature o f 100C, motive steam with pressure 3.92 MPa and we require to obtain the heating steam with pressure 0.294 MPa then we have the following situation: Enthalpy difference connected with expansion of the motive steam is 601.6 kJ kg -I. Enthalpy difference connected with compression to the required pressure is 208. l kJ kg-L Then the specific consumption of motive steam f, defined as the ratio of the mass flow rates of the motive steam and the sucked out vapors, can be easily computed and is 2.68. It means, that for 1 kg of the heating steam with pressure 0.294 MPa we need only 0.728 kg of the motive steam. The rest is obtained from a waste heat stream. In addition to the effective use of heat energy, capital and maintenance costs of ejectors are low. The elimination of a waste pressure reduction can be realized directly in the power station or with connection of streams between a power station and various processes of a chemical plant. There are many possibilities to arrange such schemes e.g. in Fig. 3, is shown the case of elimination of feed steam pressure throttling. The scheme in Fig. 5 represents the connection of two output streams of a back pressure turbine through so called regulatory ejector, in which the motive steam flow rate is affected by means o f a sliding needle. If we turn our attention to chemical processes we can see that there are many candidates for classifying processes into energy-accepting and energy-donating ones. Among technological processes, which are both energy-accepting and energy-donating, evaporation processes play an important role, such as distillation, evaporators etc. Heat contained in the waste heat streams of such processes can be used directly or indirectly as vapor created in a heat exchanger from water condensate. In conventionally arranged distillation columns energy is supplied to the reboiler and removed from the condenser. Because of the temperature difference between the reboiler and the condenser the separation of components is always accompanied by a degradation of energy even when heat leaks and other losses are excluded. Heat supplied to the reboiler is transfered in the condenser Pl < P2 < P3

PJ < P2
P~< P2

= Po

_ @

= P3 ~ P2 "- Pl

~ P2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

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S. KREJ(:i et al.

to the cooling water or air and therefore in most cases is lost for reuse. Not taking into account the heat recovery of the product streams e.g. for the feed preheating, it is obvious that distillation contains one important energy donator, i.e. the condenser, and at the same time one important energy acceptor, i.e. the reboiler. The high energy requirements of distillation can often be reduced by using a system to pump heat from the condenser to the reboiler. This is accomplished by using compression to raise the temperature level of the available heat from that of the condenser to that of the reboiler. This alteration to the conventional design often meets with difficulties resulting from the temperature difference between top and bottom of a column. If the temperature difference is too high an ejector needs greater amounts of motive steam for thermocompression and the effectiveness of such an operation is low. The difficulties can be overcome by a so called nonadiabatic column. In a nonadiabatic column a certain part of the heat is removed between feed and column head i.e. with higher temperature than in the condenser and after raising the temperature level heat is fed to the part of column between feed and the reboiler i.e. with lower temperature than in the reboiler. In such a way the reasonable temperature difference is obtained and the conditions for ejectors application become more advantageous. There is another way to increase the effectiveness of ejectors applications. In some cases it is advantageous to use the other motive medium e.g. vapor-liquid mixture. As distillation, a widely used separation technique, is very often the last part of chemical units, it can be useful to combine energy donors and acceptors of a distillation column and foregoing processes. This energy conservation principle was used in the unit of production of D M T in VCHZ Synt6zia Semtin. Steam, the pressure of which was 0.13 MPa as the waste heat of cooling stream in oxidation process was compressed to 0.3 MPa and then reused for heating of the reboiler of the methanol regeneration column. Another example of using ejectors as heat pumps is distilled water production where a part of produced vapor is used for heating the apparatus. Energy savings are about one half of the primary supplied energy. It is beyond the scope of this discussion* to make detailed comparisons of the proposed schemes with alternative schemes for energy conservation that might be applied to the same problem, such as power generation for example. Such comparisons depend on many local factors and results change from case to case. However a number of informative calculations indicate that the thermocompression scheme should be preferable in economy and simplicity in many cases.

*Further papers detailing work at the Institute of Chemical Technology are planned for future issues--Editor.