Process and Equipment Considerations In the Art of Cold Box Design

Abstract:  Cold box systems often represent complex process systems involving numerous pieces of process equipment and often approach the complexity of full process units.  Traditional piece-by-piece, siloed design approaches to equipment such as multi-stream brazed aluminum plate-fin heat exchangers often result in less than ideal designs.  Such non-systemic design approaches when applied to complex process systems such as an ethylene cold boxes result in inflexible and poorly suited systems.  Strategies to design cold box systems with process flexibility and full consideration of all design parameters such as process and fluid compositional variability with be discussed.