A novel graphical procedure based on ternary diagram for minimizing refinery consumption of fresh hydrogen

In the oil refining and petrochemical industry, hydrogen flows in so-called hydrogen networks are a common feature. A practical problem in hydrogen network analysis is to identify the minimum fresh hydrogen input flowrate to ensure that the hydrogen streams produced by combining the flows of internal sources satisfy certain concentration specifications of sinks for hydrogen and impurities such as H2S. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a novel graphical procedure, much inspired by the pioneering work of Shelley and El-Halwagi (2000) that makes use of the unique features of ternary composition diagram for three-component systems. In addition, accounting for constraints on flowrates inside a ternary visualization diagram is another novel aspect of this graphical method. Two literature case studies based on hydrogen systems with multiple impurities are solved to illustrate the effectiveness and elegance of the proposed method.