رضا آذین

Natural gas has become an important source of producing energy due its advantages on other fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Natural gas processing involves removal of impurities and separation of heavy and light hydrocarbons through sequence of processes in order to be used in various industries. In this work a simulation of an industrial pre-fractionation gas condensate unit is cunducted using Aspen Plus software. In doing so, CPA EoS is used as the thermodyanic model. Energy consumption and separation of hydrocarbon streams by means of two different methods, namely, multistage flash vaporization and fractionation are compared. The simulation results shows that multistage flash vaporization consumes about 35.6% less energy than fractionation approach. Also, comparison of simulation results and actual plant data indicates that both methods are capable in predicting stream flow rates, however fractionation method gives more accurate approximation of stream flow rates. Also, best prediction of light ends and heavy ends’ flow rates are obtained by using fractionation and multistage flash vaporization methods, respectively.