Design of an industrial fan-powered cooler unit at the TEG inlet of a conventional natural gas dehydration plant

The natural gas industry faces significant challenges due to water vapor that is associated with natural gas, which results to issues like hydrate formation, blockages, corrosion of processing facilities and flow assurance related issues. To address this, the triethylene glycol (TEG) dehydration process is crucial for efficient water removal. A critical component of this process plant is the fan-powered cooler which regulates the temperature of lean TEG for optimum dehydration. This research integrates the conservation principle of mass and energy balance in the development of the fan-powered cooler design models and HYSYS simulation of the conventional dehydration plant in order to analyze the performance of the fan-powered cooler in terms of mass and energy balance during the dehydration process. Analysis of the results showed that the fan-powered cooler as a single input and single output unit gave the same value of 0.14221kg/s for mass flow rate at inlet and exit streams, but in terms of energy balance, the inlet and outlet temperature was 60.1437⁰C and 48.8889⁰C respectively, the temperature difference (reduction) showed that the lean temperature was reduced by the cooler before it was feed to the contactor in order to prevent loss of TEG during the dehydration process. This clearly showed why a cooler is configured at the TEG inlet to the contactor in a dehydration plant and improves the efficiency of dehydration process.