ENERGY EFFICIENCY ASSESMENT OF CENTRIFUGAL GAS COMPRESSOR

Abstract

­Centrifugal gas compressors are critical for energy consumption in petrochemical industry. However, continuous operations under varying load due to supply and demand mismatch cause energy performance inefficiency. Existing approaches lacks integration of operational data to assess actual energy efficiency of the centrifugal gas compressor. Therefore, this study monitors a real time performance parameter to assess energy efficiency of the centrifugal gas compressor (CC). Furthermore, energy consumption & load in terms of shaft speed as function of capacity were used as a key indicator to verify the actual operation and energy consumption of CC. To determine the condition and operation of centrifugal compressors, a detailed performance analysis was conducted. However, it was observed that drop in performance was due to the internal component degradation, mechanical wear, and fouling, resulted higher energy consumption, reduce reliability, costly unplanned shutdowns. The results showed that the lower and upper limits for compressing production gas for stage 1 are 71.52 and 88.20MMSCFD, which consuming power 4772.89 and 5239.54 kW respectively. Moreover, for stage 2 the lower and upper limits for compressing production gas are 181.3 and 196.9 MMSCFD, consuming power with 9813.10 and 10995.70 kW respectively. Moreover, results showed that on most working days, the energy consumption is less 1995.60 kWh/MMSCFD in the First stage due to the production of low-pressure gas and it will increase  in the second stage  up to 5175.89 kWh/MMSCFD  due to the production of high-pressure gas and performance drop.