Studying the effect of feed composition variation on typical natural gas liquid (NGL) recovery processes

Abstract

In this work, the different process schemes used for known NGL recovery methods have been studied with various feed compositions. The original turbo-expander process scheme (ISS) was considered as a base case. The GSP, CRR, RSV and RSVE process schemes are those which focus on improvement at the top of the demethanizer column, while the IPSI-1 and IPSI-2 at the bottom of the demethanizer column. All the process schemes have initially built using ASPEN HYSYS with a common set of operating criteria. Numerous simulation runs have been made later by taking various typical feed compositions classified as lean and rich. Regardless of the common operating conditions set to each process schemes, there exist different performance results obtained from the simulation. Accordingly, the reboiler duty requirement is high for the GSP, CRR, RSV and RSVE due to the need for external refrigeration. However, the IPSI-1 and IPSI-2 simulation result show relatively lower reboiler duty requirement for the self-refrigeration system applied to the systems.