Techno-economic evaluation and design development of sour water stripping system in the refineries

With an increasing focus on energy performance improvements and strict environmental laws, there is a need to recycle water resources and reuse them in the industry. Refineries consumes huge amounts of water which offer an opportunity to reprocess it in an efficient manner. This study focusses on the design and simulation of sour water stripping (SWS) unit in the refinery setup for the reuse of sour water. The stripper removes the H₂S and NH₃ content from the sour water making it recyclable for various processes. In this study, process simulation has been performed to analyze the energy saving and cost reducing prospects in the sour water stripping unit. Various alternative designs have been developed to seek process improvements either by improving the energy efficiency or by reducing the sour water stripping unit cost. A novel design has been proposed in this study that can reduce the energy requirement by around 53% compared to the conventional designs. The results of this study provide a meaningful analysis in terms of energy and economic considerations to improve the performance of the sour water units in the refineries.