AUTOMATION OF THE PROCESS OF BITUMEN PRODUCTION

Abstract

One of the most important directions in the field of oil refining is the rational use of oil residues by involving them in processes such as visbreaking, coking, de-asphalting, bitumen production. Petroleum bitumen is used in road construction, in the repair of roads, airfields, in industrial and civil construction (for the manufacture of roofing materials, for the insulation of pipelines from ground corrosion, for the preparation of paint and varnish materials). The quality of petroleum bitumen is a determining factor in ensuring the durability of road surfaces. To date, up to 70% of bitumen produced in Kazakhstan and the CIS countries do not meet the assortment and quality requirements of the modern market, and this primarily concerns bitumen for road, construction and special purposes. The decrease in natural oil reserves and the difficulty of obtaining high-quality bitumen from processed raw materials at most bitumen plants necessitates the search for new materials to obtain binders of a given quality. The process of bitumen production, carried out on an industrial scale, is very complex, but by now it has been sufficiently studied. However, the approach to the study of this process from the standpoint of the physico-chemical technology of oil dispersed systems reveals new aspects that allow us to hope for its further intensification. Due to the increasing volumes of consumption and the expansion of the field of application of petroleum bitumen, the issue of searching for new raw materials is acute. One of the most promising deposits of petroleum bitumen rocks are West Kazakhstan, where more than 50 deposits with reserves of 152 million tons have been discovered. However, to date, the extraction of petroleum bitumen rocks and their use in construction have not acquired significant proportions, due to their insufficient knowledge and imperfection of their processing technology. Until now, the main attention in matters of oxidation is paid to the study of the state of the vapor–liquid system, calculations of the partial pressure of volatile components of the oil system depending on its composition and external conditions, which is fundamental for technological calculations. In this case, oil is represented as a multicomponent molecular solution, the vapor-liquid interface is considered flat, and the vapor pressure above the flat surface is equal to the pressure in the liquid phase. In addition, in all thermodynamic and technological calculations, the vapor-liquid system is thermodynamically formed, leaving the process of vapor phase generation without due attention.