Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2021
26th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF A SOLAR WATER HEATING SYSTEM TO AVOID THE FORMATION OF PARAFFIN DEPOSITS IN ONSHORE OIL PRODUCTION COLUMNS
Submission Author:
Vinicius Rugeri Borges Bonini , SC , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Vinicius Rugeri Borges Bonini, Allan Ricardo Starke, Sergio Colle
Presenter: Vinicius Rugeri Borges Bonini
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2021.COB2021-0143
Abstract
The paraffin deposition on oil production columns, and pipe walls, ends up restricting the flow of the crude oil, reducing the pumping efficiency, and, in extreme cases, may cause emergency stops of oil production, incurring financial losses, and even safety problems. To avoid pipe obstruction, hot water injection inside the production column can solve this problem. Water is heated by burning natural gas or by electrical resistance. A renewable alternative to reduce natural gas and the electrical energy consumption is the use of a solar process heating system. The decision of replacing the conventional system with a solar system requires a technical and economical evaluation of the behavior of the new system, which must be made through detailed simulations concerning the operation of this proposed system. The present work focused on the transient simulation platform to evaluate the performance of the proposed solar water heating system, by using TRNSYS software. This software offers great flexibility to perform the dynamic simulation of thermal systems, as it is able, to evaluate the performance with the variation of the solar radiation over time. The proposed system consists of a field of flat plate solar collectors, which heats the injection water indirectly through a coiled heat exchanger immersed in the thermal reservoir (3m3). The heated water, at a temperature of 95ºC, contained in the reservoir is injected daily into the oil production column. The mathematical models used in the simulation platform were modified to be able to consider the shading in the collector field and the pressure drop of the entire hydraulic circuit, accounting for the parasitic electrical power consumed in operation. For the city of Candeias-Bahia, initially, the effects of the design variables, collector area, collector inclination, row distance, system flow rate, fuel tariff, inflation, and discount rate, on the thermal and economic performance of the system were analyzed through the solar fraction and LCS, respectively. Optimization in terms of the analyzed variables, lead to an optimized LCS of R$151.900,00, for a solar field of 113.22m2, reaching an annual solar fraction of 63,7% and a payback time of 6.6 years.
Keywords
Avoid paraffin deposition, Petroleum, Solar process heat, Simulation, Economic analysis, TRNSYS
