Nowadays, decreasing the amount of natural resources and increasing the price of it, motivates to consider energy conservation as a main concern of many process industries, especially oil, refinery and petrochemical plants.
Pinch Analysis (PA) is a powerful method for identifying and selecting technical solution to improve efficiencies and provide an optimum procedure for energy saving.
This paper analyses, the effectiveness of applying PA to optimize energy consumption for a given set of process streams in a Petrochemical Company in Iran. In this study, firstly, the interested process streams have been selected, maximum heating and cooling load are computed, and then composite curves have been drawn - by Matlab code - which provides a visual profile of the availability of heating or cooling from the process streams. Secondly, the cost of recovered heat is computed in terms of fuel saving, which confirms applying PA could save significant amount of fuel expenses for the company. Finally, the corresponded Heat Exchanger Network (HEN) has been designed, and the investment costs for heat exchangers have been computed in order to find out payback time of the investment costs which is approximately 17 months for this case study
