Heat Exchanger Process Optimization in A Typical Brewery Plant

The research attempts to improve upon the performance efficiency of the heat exchanger network system of Pabod Brewery, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria. It swaps the heat system of the plant by the use of Pinch Technology to recover waste heat and integrating the recovered energy for process application. The application software is Microsoft Excel and Problem Table Method was employed in the numerical analysis of data. The gross energy expenditure by the plant is 10.44MW at production capacity of 400,000 liters of beer per day. On quantitative aggregate 6.157MW goes for heating and 4.267MW for cooling. A temperature pinch or minimum approach temperature (?T_min)of 10⁰C was used in the pinch analysis of the heat exchangers performance. The research findings confirmed minimum heating utility of 5.04MW and cooling utility of 3.09MW. with energy upturn of 1.08MW and 1.23MW for the hot and cold flows respectively. This correlates to energy conservation of 18% for hot utility and 21% for the cold utility. The hot stream pinch temperature is 71⁰C while that of the cold stream is 61⁰C. Heat exchangers network configuration design were performed above and below the pinch The network designs were produced and integrated to produce improved heat exchanger network system for the Brewery plant.