A simple approach for evaluating the performance of a refrigeration system in the natural gas processing industry

Refrigeration systems are common in the natural gas processing industry and processes related to the petroleum refining, petrochemical, and chemical industries. Several applications for refrigeration include natural gas liquids (NGL) recovery, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) recovery, hydrocarbon dew point control, reflux condensation for light hydrocarbon fractionators, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants. In the present work, simple-to-use predictive tool is formulated to arrive at an appropriate estimation of main design parameters in three-stage propane refrigerant systems. The proposed tool is suitable for the range of evaporator temperatures between -40 °C and 60 °C and the refrigerant condensing temperatures range between 10 °C to 70 °C. Results show that the proposed predictive tool has a very good agreement with the reported data wherein the average absolute deviation percent hovered around 1.4%. The tool developed in this study can be of immense practical value for the engineers and scientists to have a quick check on the performance of propane refrigerant systems at various conditions. In particular, gas processing and chemical engineers would find the proposed approach to be user-friendly with transparent calculations involving no complex expressions.