Abstract:
Fossil fuels are the primary source of energy and are playing a vital role in fulfilling our demand of the energy for transportation, electricity and industry. However, their wide spread use is associated with a number of hazardous environmental consequences. Increasing environmental awareness have provided basis for the development of clean sources of energy. Natural gas is considered more suitable and eco-friendly, among all the fossil fuels, however, its reserves are located remotely and are not uniformly distributed. Therefore, it is liquefied. The production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is energy intensive process. LNG is produced using the number of technologies including expander based processes, mixed refrigerant based processes and cascade processes. Among all, single mixed refrigerant (SMR) process is the most popular process due to its simplicity, compactness and better performance. Mixed refrigerant based liquefaction processes have a strong relation with the selection of mixed refrigerants components. Mixed refrigerants with different components are reported in open literature and generally, 4 to 6 working fluid components are used in SMR process. These components are selected based on researchers’ knowledge. The comparison of the different combinations of the working fluid have seldom been reported. In this study, combination of four, five, and six components-based mixed-refrigerants will be selected from the available database. These combinations will be employed in an SMR process which will be simulated using Aspen Hysys for the calculation of specific energy consumption for LNG production. The combination with the least specific energy consumption will be selected for performance analysis. The exergy analysis of the refrigerant with least energy consumption will also be performed.
